Attention

Zombie apocalypse? Or Zombie bigger bang for the cue?

One of the most hair-raising thought experiments in philosophy of mind is the philosophical zombie, a being that is physically and behaviorally identical to a normal human, but is not conscious of having any mental states, like the fellow on the right in the figure below.     The existence of such a being provides […]

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Mechanisms of Attentional Control: A Special Issue in Honor of the Contributions of Steven Yantis

Steve Yantis was a leading researcher in attention and cognitive neuroscience who passed away two years ago. In recognition of his work for the Psychonomic Society, one of the Society’s Early Career Awards is named in his honor. And just this week, a special issue of the Psychonomic Society’s journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics appeared in honor of the contributions […]

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“My brain made me do it”: Reading our free will(usion)

The waiter asks whether you’d prefer potatoes or rice with your entrecote. Are you free to make that decision based on, well, free will? Or should you respond with “Look, I am a determinist. I will just wait and see what I order because I know that my order is determined”? At first glance, the […]

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Creating rectangles on the fly: Attentional set and object-based effects

Attention guides human perception, memory, and action in intriguing ways. Some time ago on this blog we learned that visual search can be directed by conceptual information: Saying or reading a word such as “tomato” makes it easier to find red things. We also learned on this blog that looking at a tomato can help you touch […]

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Keeping Andromeda peripheral: tracking multiple targets out of the corner of your eye

We owe most of our visual acuity to our fovea, the area of the retina that is most densely packed with photo-receptive cones. Whenever we focus on an object, we move our eyes so that the image is projected onto this area that contains nearly 150,000 cone receptors per square millimeter. Anything that is projected onto […]

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Lifelong experience with video gaming confers enhanced cognitive benefits

Video games have gotten a bad rap. When googling “do video games”, the first results Google suggests are “rot your brain”, “make you dumber”, and then finally “make you smarter.” As far as the last option is concerned, evidence seems to be accumulating that shows that gaming does enhance visual processing and cognitive control skills. […]

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Groundhog Day is better for your homework

Groundhog Day is better for your homework: We adapt to attentional conflict but only if nothing changes William James famously postulated that the world presents itself as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” to an infant, whose senses are constantly assaulted by visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory stimuli. To make sense of the world requires attention, […]

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Eating dinner without checking your email: impulse control, time preference, and mobile device usage

How well would you do in the phone stacking game? In case you have not heard of it, it’s played during a dinner out and it goes as follows: at the beginning of the meal everyone puts their phone on a pile in the middle of the table. Like this: And then you start ordering drinks […]

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