We have known Larry for a long time. At first it was a one-way affair, when we were in graduate school and read his work. After we studied Larry’s paper on ad-hoc categories our view on semantic memory was never the same again. We had been working on the boundary between episodic and semantic memory, […]
Meaning/Semantics
Much to the chagrin of my Vietnamese parents, and probably also a few French teachers from my school years, I never picked up a language beyond English well enough to comfortably call myself bilingual. I think the closest thing to a bilingual experience I’ve ever had was when I attempted to order in French at […]
Everyone struggles to remember things. Whether it’s a home address, someone’s phone number, or even a new acquaintance’s name—it’s challenging to recall information when we need to. We have lost count of the number of times we’ve been introduced to someone only to immediately forget their name. However, some things might be easier to remember […]
“The impious warbler delved into the paltry aperitif and anointed the pumice with ineffable rigmarole.” That’s a sentence with a lot of big words (and I hope it’s never been uttered before), but if you understood that I was referring to a nasty little bird that wiped some booze on a rock, then you may […]
With the return of the sunny days of summer (save for our friends in the southern hemisphere), you might find yourself in a situation where, having invited your best friends for a barbecue, you forget the sausages on the grill and serve them, er, completely charred. Seeing the blackened meat, one of them snickers: “You’re […]
Everyone wants to be better at focusing, remembering, and problem-solving, right? The self-help market recognizes and exploits this and is teeming with brain games that promise a sharper mind. Many of these games are based on tasks that cognitive psychologists use to study working memory, the system involved in short-term processing and storage of information. Whether or […]
Compound words are funny creatures. They exist as words themselves, but also contain smaller words which have their own unique meanings. For example, the compound word butterfly refers to the pretty insect with wings, but it also contains the smaller words butter (yellow spread made from cream) and fly (move through the air). But how […]
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 […]
Sarcasm, a type of irony, is inescapably embedded in the internet today, with ironic language of some kind being ubiquitous on Facebook, Twitter, in blogs, in news articles, and more. Computers, unlike people, often fail to detect sarcasm, which has the notable quality of often meaning nearly the opposite of what was written. For example, […]
You may have heard that the United States had a presidential election last year. You may have also heard that the winner of that election was an outsider, a “straight-talker,” and an anti-establishment candidate. Enough material to fill the Library of Congress has been written on the content of what (first candidate, and now) President […]