I recently had the pleasure of meeting with Allie Sinclair to chat about her latest paper published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. True or False? Diamonds are formed when coal undergoes high pressure. Coffee reduces the influence of alcohol. Sunflowers turn to track the sun across the sky. All are false. If you happened to […]
Learning and Memory
Have you ever been hit on the head? How long it’s been since you did? Blows to the head are not uncommon, they can happen in sports, accidental falls, fights, and in plenty of other ways. Heck, they can happen sometimes just because you crouch down looking for something and then miscalculate your distance when […]
Professor David Rapp is one of the Guest Editors for a special issue in Cognitive Research: Principles & Implications (aka CR:PI) on the Psychology of Fake News. The submission deadline has been extended, so if you think that you missed your chance to submit your work on this important topic in what is sure to […]
TikToks are short videos that typically show a set of movements. Doing the Macarena requires remembering a sequence of movements to make up the dance. Our communications are full of hand gestures and body movements. These “co-speech” hand gestures are meaningful and often relate to the content of our speech. Co-speech gestures enhance the understanding of a listener, help a […]
I met with Annika Boldt and Sam Gilbert (pictured below) to interview them about their paper recently published in the Psychonomic Society journal Cognitive Principles: Research and Implications called “Confidence guides spontaneous cognitive offloading.” When we do something to minimize cognitive demands, we are offloading. This is especially common when we write notes and set alerts, for […]
Jennifer Coane and I chatted about how her life as an academic has changed as a result of COVID-19, her recent paper with Kimberly Bourne, Sarah Boland, and Grace Arnold (pictured below) published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, and what the results of that research may mean during these challenging times. The paper is called “Reading […]
Have you paid any mind to the growing popularity of mindfulness? It seems everywhere I look there is a new promotion or app touting the benefits of this meditative practice. But what exactly is mindfulness and how might it benefit us? Mindfulness is a state of being that is characterized by a nonreactive awareness of […]
We have become experts at remembering pieces of information that share no natural relationships. For example, your friend may have just started a new job, and it is easy for you to remember where she works because the company’s logo and her favorite color are both red. When thinking about remembering two pieces of information, […]
Can we predict the future? In 2011, Bem published a paper describing results from 9 experiments suggesting that we can. The research was quickly debunked and became part of what kicked off the movement to correct replicability issues in psychological science. Alas, there is no evidence that we have the powers of prediction. We do, however, […]
We rarely listen to just one stream of information at a time. Whether we are at a dinner party, on a crowded bus, or talking on the phone while walking down a busy street, more often than not there are multiple voices that compete for our attention. People are generally very good at focusing on […]