Divided Attention

Watch the Road! Are failures of distracted driving due to using peripheral vision or the difficulty of the distracting task?

Although the human experience is truly a unique one, it’s comforting to know that we all share some experiences and emotions. For example, we were all excited the day we were handed our very first motor vehicle driver’s license. You know, the one with the awkward smile and terrible lighting. When we first received our […]

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Spreading your attention divides your rate of conscious perception

One recommendation to reduce COVID-19 transmission is to keep a distance of at least 2 meters/6 feet from others. If you are a pedestrian making your way through busy city streets, this advice is easier said than done. There’s a lot to keep track of to maintain distance with people coming from different directions and […]

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Ignoring your family but not your teacher: Irrelevant speech and talker familiarity

We rarely listen to just one stream of information at a time. Whether we are at a dinner party, on a crowded bus, or talking on the phone while walking down a busy street, more often than not there are multiple voices that compete for our attention. People are generally very good at focusing on […]

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Tapped out: The complex relationship between rhythm perception, memory, and movement

Certain songs have a way of getting into your head and staying there for a while. We’ve covered the cognitive side of earworms before. These songs that haunt us tend to have a recognizable tempo or beat—usually one that we can move to. Lady Gaga has given us a number of earworms, including Poker Face, […]

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How do we decide what’s true or false? – A fight between dead philosophers

As we go about our daily lives, we are constantly exposed to new information―news reports from a foreign country, politicians’ statements about domestic policy, a friend’s description of a new restaurant, and celebrity gossip.  Some of that information is true and some is false. How do we remember which statements are true and which are […]

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Tracking down the bottleneck: The locus of the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP)

People often do multiple things at the same time. We can talk on the phone while stacking the dishwasher, and some university students seemingly know how to type messages on their cell phones while listening to a lecture. There are many occasions, however, when such multi-tasking breaks down or becomes dangerous. For example, notwithstanding how […]

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When Rain Man meets Braille: Tactile Subitizing and Numerosity Estimates

Put Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman together and you get Rain Man, the Academy-Award winning story of an autistic savant—played by Hoffman who received the Best Actor award for his performance—who turns out to have many unexpected talents. The clip below shows one famous scene, in which Hoffman knows within seconds that the waitress dropped […]

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The good, the bad, and the media multi-tasking: It’s all the internet’s fault. Or is it?

Apparently the internet, video games, and social media are damaging our children’s development, and are responsible for the increase in autism over the last few decades—or so it has been claimed, although that claim hasn’t withstood scrutiny. Similarly, Wikipedia has an entry for something known as Internet addiction disorder, which apparently occurs when internet use […]

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The Unbearable Distraction of Being Sweet: Performing in the Presence of Candy

Think eating is easy? Think again. According to the World Health Organization, more than 1.9 billion adults were overweight worldwide in 2016. Of these, over 650 million were obese—a number equivalent to roughly twice the population of the United States. And most of the world’s population lives in countries in which obesity kills more people […]

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