I was sitting in the audience, listening to a symposium speaker field questions, when someone asked about working memory. “Working memory? Does anyone actually believe in that anymore?” was the speaker’s reply, and from the inside of my narrowly-focused scientific bubble, it astonished me. I had only recently taken up my first tenure-track position as […]
Learning and Memory
Nelson Cowan’s review of definitions of “working memory” provides a very useful overview of the different ways in which the term has been and is still being used in the literature, and the potential confusion that can be caused by its multi-faceted meaning. Cowan identified nine definitions spanning multiple disciplines and several decades of research, […]
Type “working memory” into Google Scholar and you get nearly 2,000,000 results. Topping the list is the paper “working memory” by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch, which has been cited more than 12,000 times since its publication in 1974. The Web of Science search engine is slightly more modest, with around 54,000 scientific publications being […]
This election has been intense, in every sense of the word. At times, some of us might have wished to just shut out the images of angry faces and the sounds of hateful or uninformed utterances. You could have closed your eyes, but you sadly cannot close your ears. It seems clear that this openness […]
What color is Wednesday? If the answer is obvious to you, you might have a form of synesthesia in which sequences such as numbers, days of the week, and months of the year are perceived as having colors (or else you might be from Thailand). Initially, one may well be skeptical on being told that […]
Conversations in Milan, Rome, or Madrid seem ever so much more animated and exciting than those polite chats over a tea cozy in Oxford, London, or Wetwang (Yorkshire). At least in part, this may reflect the greater physical rigor that denizens of the Mediterranean exhibit during their speech. As the New York Times put it: […]
When we were first married, my husband and I frequented a local BBQ restaurant. He ordered the fried chicken – all drumsticks – and I loved the brisket sandwich. One weekend, we both developed tummy troubles the morning after we ate there, and automatically thought “It must have been the BBQ food!” My husband and […]
Old Faithful but not El Capitan: multiple-choice pretesting helps learning about cronartium ribicola
Old Faithful…. Hayden Valley…. Mammoth Hot springs. Clearly I am talking about the natural wonders of Yellowstone National Park. Now try and answer the following question: What state does the majority of the park reside in? The choices are: (a) Idaho; (b)South Dakota; (c) Wyoming; (d) Montana. If you correctly picked Wyoming, you clearly know too […]
For many people, a trip to the beach is the highlight of the summer. The salty air, lounging on the sand, the sound of waves, swimming, drying off in the sun, the smell of sunscreen, a stack of beach reads. But first, it’s time to pack those suitcases… Where are the swimming suits again? How […]
Generating the angular velocities of planetary and annular gears: When self-generating explanations helps learning Tell me, how does a differential work? Can you explain it to me? All of us who drive or ride in cars rely on a differential to get us around corners under power, and yet not all of us know that […]