When the cat barks and the guitar has a bow: Neurocognitive signatures of processing perplexing text “A mouse was looking for something to eat while a bigger animal was waiting to hunt it.” What’s your best guess about which animal was lurking over the unfortunate mouse’s shoulder? I suspect you would be surprised if the […]
Learning and Memory
Here is a neat finding, originally reported by Gillian Cohen in 1990. It is easier to remember that someone is a baker than that someone’s name is Baker. Although both memories seem to require making a connection between the person’s appearance and the very same word “baker,” the profession baker is meaningful, evoking rich imagery and other associations. The name […]
Human beings think. What’s more, we also think about our own thinking—that is, we monitor, recognize, and control our own cognitive processes. This ability is known as metacognition, and it allows us to make judgments of learning or knowing, for example when we ask ourselves questions such as “What do I already know about this topic? […]
Can we improve human intelligence through training? Generations of researchers have tackled this apparently simple question, and yet, after approximately a century of efforts, the malleability of intelligence remains controversial. The potential payoff is high—imagine what it would mean if we could actually train intelligence—but the road to conclusive evidence on the matter appears to […]
So what’s this שטיק about working memory? Out of 71 posts on this site that we have published since starting out 9 months ago, 7 were about working memory or have at least mentioned it (here, here, here, here, here, and here). This is indicative of the importance of working memory to human cognition—and indeed, we have noted repeatedly that working memory explains roughly half the […]
When do you look something up, and when do you try to remember it? One of the hallmarks of humans is our ability to store and access information in the environment around us as well as in our own central nervous systems. We have an external memory and an internal memory. Many tasks involve moment-to-moment trade-offs between the two. The “soft […]
What’s the capital of Burkina Faso? Which bird can fly backwards? What was the first human invention to break the sound barrier? Questions of this type probe what is called “semantic memory”, the repository of our general knowledge, which is known to be organized by meaning rather than by autobiographical cues. For example, you may […]
Anyone who has ever written a book knows how long and arduous the process can be. Anyone who has authored 2 or 3 books should take justifiable pride in their accomplishments. But I know no one who could conceivably author more than 500 books. It sounds preposterous to even think that this many books might […]
Do children misbehave during a full moon? Are Asians “pushy”? Are the members of minority group X particularly prone to alcoholism? People often fall prey to developing such associations even though they are entirely illusory—that is, the actual statistics of the environment warrant no such beliefs. In the laboratory, those illusory correlations are readily evoked […]
Why do people cooperate? Why do we band together in extraordinary numbers to solve problems? Why do we commit acts of “heroism” to protect or save others, including sometimes people we don’t even know personally? The level of cooperation that humans routinely exhibit poses an evolutionary puzzle and an enigma to economists. The essence of cooperation is the fact […]