The tuxedo, the baton, the gestures – conducting an orchestra is, in part, about appearances. But beneath the facade, conductors have extraordinary cognitive abilities, which allow them to do their jobs. Conductors must maintain a constant tempo for a piece – which requires long term memory – and they must be able to listen to both […]
Learning and Memory
We have no difficulty picking “rat” as the odd one out from the set “goat – deer – rat”. This ready access to semantic structure in our memories supports many essential cognitive capabilities. It allows us to be guided in our current understanding and behavior by prior knowledge and experience. For example, if we learned […]
“During the summer of 1979, Bernard Pagano, a Catholic priest, was arrested and put on trial in Delaware for a series of armed robberies. Seven eyewitnesses, ranging from clerks to bystanders, positively identified Father Pagano as the “gentleman bandit,” whose well-tailored appearance and courteous manners always belied his felonious purpose. As the trial was nearing […]
Most objects that surround us seem familiar and are easily identifiable even when viewed from the corner of our eyes. We are so quick to identify objects that it almost seems trivial, but just like speech production, object recognition is quite complex. How is object recognition actually achieved? Of course knowing what objects tend to be […]
Nearly every psychologist has experienced the results of an experiment coming up inconclusive, where the statistics couldn’t tell us one way or the other whether our manipulation had worked. These experiments often go straight into the file drawer, to languish forever amongst years-old consent forms. Our distaste for such null results is due in part to […]
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 […]
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 […]