What makes students and instructors choose, sustain their learning with, and learn meaningfully from instructional videos? I recently became the homeowner of a mid-80s colonial revival and have taken on several projects to bring it out of the 80s and into a more contemporary style. Levelling out a sunken dining room is much more challenging […]
Digital Event
Here’s a burning question: What strategies can actually improve classroom learning? One promising strategy—pretesting—may be the answer for both instructors and students. Certainly, the notion of “evidence-based teaching” is becoming entrenched in the education lexicon, as instructors search for answers. Institutions are spending lots of money, resources, labour, and time to develop websites, offer workshops, […]
Imagine you have a 4-year-old about to participate in the marshmallow test, a measure of their ability to delay gratification. In front of them is a treat, and they have the option to take the immediate, smaller reward (e.g., one marshmallow) or receive a delayed, larger reward (e.g., two marshmallows) by waiting until an experimenter […]
At the Psychonomic Society Digital Event, Research in Time of Crisis, in May 2020, members contributed ideas on how to do “science without the drag.” That is, how do we produce, evaluate, and disseminate high-quality research to match the rapid pace of decision-making needed in the face of COVID-19? Below are the links to the […]
All animals need to search their environment – for food, for predators, for mates. When humans search for a specific target, the target often pops out from the background. For example, in the image below, the fish is obviously different than the people. No matter how many people were present, the fish would always be […]
I once asked Anne Treisman, my Ph.D. supervisor, how and when I could get my Ph.D. Anne told me that I will get it once I learn all the good things from her and establish something of my own. This meant that I must learn everything about focused attention then find something new. Considering the […]
One needs to look no further than the rich set of articles in this special issue to know that Feature Integration Theory (FIT) continues to be one of the most influential sets of ideas in cognitive psychology. From research on multi-sensory integration to depression, the seeds of Anne Treisman’s theory have spread far and wide. […]
My decades-long involvement with Anne Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory (FIT) must have begun in 1986. I was a junior faculty member at MIT at the time, working on visual aftereffects and binocular vision. I didn’t know much about attention. One might say that I had not paid attention to attention. Then, in 1986, Anne published an […]
When confronted with the Black Death in the middle ages, leading authorities resorted to analysis of the position of the planets —Jupiter’s hostility against Mars features prominently— to explain the plague. Today, authorities rely mainly on science to explain and manage the COVID-19 pandemic. The success of this is borne out in countries such as […]
Academic peer review of scientific manuscripts often falls short. It invariably slows and sometimes prevents the publication of good research. And it sometimes leads to the distribution and amplification of flawed research. Prestigious journals sometimes publish research grounded on shaking theory that used weak measures and inappropriate analyses to reach dubious conclusions. Failings of peer […]