Around this time of year, when the weather is cooling and the leaves are turning, I love to snuggle up on the couch and watch a good crime mystery! One of my absolute favorite shows is BBC’s, Sherlock, a television crime drama based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes detective stories. The show stars […]
Learning and Memory
Memory is such a fickle thing. Have you ever found yourself forgetting things that you should have remembered and remembered things that you should have forgotten? This happens to me all the time! I can completely forget where I placed my cell phone, even if placed minutes ago. However, I can remember lyrics to a […]
The night before a big exam, college students may attempt to “study” by listening to their recorded notes while they fall asleep. They may feel that processing the information before sleep will help them remember it better the next day. A number of studies have shown this to be effective, even though it didn’t help […]
Imagine learning how to read and play music for the first time. It starts with a series of dots and lines thrown around on a piece of paper. Soon you learn how to interpret these so-called notes. You assign a letter name to each note, and then you figure out how to produce that note […]
What’s SpongeBob Squarepants’ claim to fame besides being an animated cheese-looking, blockhead sponge under-the-sea main character of a children’s cartoon with catchy song lyrics? Apparently, aside from the possible influence on decreased attention span in children, the creators of SpongeBob SquarePants weren’t too far off in their character portrayal of different sea creatures, including the […]
If you’re an educator, you’ve probably wondered how many of your students are paying attention as you deliver course content in class. Although most research on mind wandering has been conducted in the laboratory, understanding when and why students mind wander during class can have important implications for how we teach and design our learning […]
Psychologists have been fascinated with the effects of competition on performance for a long time. Way back in 1898, Triplett found that bike racers were faster when racing against each other versus against the clock and similar research continues to this day. A recent summary suggests that competition can be both beneficial and harmful, depending […]
Here’s a disconcerting thought: what if the baggage screener at the airport – not that many of us are spending much time in airports these days – got paid a bonus for confidently flagging bags for additional inspection? In an ideal world, they would just assess bags based on the perceptual information they have from […]
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 […]
Do you sometimes hear words that are entirely different from what was said? And how about mishearing the lyrics to popular songs, as demonstrated in the video below? If you answered yes to these questions, you are not alone! False hearing is a common phenomenon that happens to people of all ages. For the record, […]