November is here. The leaves changed from green into vibrant yellows, oranges, and reds and carpeted the streets. The air chilled, so my winter clothes reappeared, replacing my summer clothes, as I braced myself for the colder months ahead. Root vegetables supplanted fresh salads on my menus. For me, an American in the UK, November […]
Learning and Memory
While you might not think of it, your life and your experience of moving through the world is governed by innumerable sets of rules that you’ve learned. We tend not to think much about these rules or grammars, much less how we learn them, but they’re nearly as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. Imagine […]
In this podcast episode, I interview Sezin Öner about her paper published in Memory & Cognition. The paper reports research conducted collaboratively with 30 researchers from 15 countries around the world. Participants in those countries reported unusual national and global events during the first signs of the pandemic and what may occur in the future. The authors considered […]
Doctor’s visit, shot, Band-Aid, and a lollipop. It’s a familiar scene from many a childhood vaccination. But what if inoculations could prevent more than just disease? Stephan Lewandowsky and Mushin Yesilada (pictured below) investigated just that in a recent experiment published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, a Psychonomic Society journal. In a large online […]
Which steak would you prefer: one that is 25% fat, or one that is 75% lean? If you’re like the participants in a classic study by Irwin Levin, you’d pick the latter. This finding represents a framing effect, where equivalent information presented in different ways influences behavior. In this example, the steak labeled with a […]
If you are a cognitive psychologist, you have probably used the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm in your lectures as a false memory demonstration. If not, try the demo now by reading the following list. Try to remember the words for a memory test (don’t take notes!): soda heart tooth tart taste sour bitter good sugar candy nice […]
What do we know about the structures of our knowledge and its connectivity? Do they differ between novices and experts, especially on the topics of experts? Imagine if I asked you to come up with as many words as possible related to quantum mechanics. How many words would you generate? How about if you had […]
Let’s get this post started with a cognitive science themed trivia question. What’s the name of the intelligence component comprising declarative and procedural knowledge learnt by an individual throughout their life span? The answer is: crystallized intelligence. Information such as the number of different words a person knows (vocabulary size) and the ability to retrieve […]
If you watched the Academy Award winning film, CODA (trailer below), you’ll appreciate that the character who played the son is a native signer. That is, he learned sign language from his parents from the start. How do we learn spatial relations? It’s a fundamental ability we pick up early. Much of what we know […]
Rhyming verses may make you think of Shakespearean sonnets or old-fashioned love poems. Yet, rhymes are ubiquitous in modern life. We remember how to spell words by repeating “i before e, except after c,” and the number of days in the months through “Thirty days hath September …,” Attorneys admonish jurors that “if it doesn’t […]