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 […]
Learning and Memory
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 […]
An old but common adage is that “context is everything”, and while this aphorism can be applied to many different topics, it has been especially significant in theories of memory. Even in early psychological research, theorists believed that having knowledge and memory for an item meant connecting it to the “context which the world provides”, […]
The idea of enhanced or superior memory is a theme that has long fascinated cognitive researchers and society in general. It has been the theme of various novels, films, and probably an equal number of academic journal articles. The single question motivating both works of fact and fiction is, what techniques might an individual employ […]
In the late 90s, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks starred in the romantic comedy, “You’ve Got Mail”, which romanticized the idea of online dating and amplified AOL’s fame. “The Dating Game” Shortly after this movie, the year 2000 was the official start to dating websites with the release of eharmony, according to the “history of […]
In the late 1970s, a chimpanzee named Sarah watched a human named Keith struggle to complete simple tasks. When given various solutions, Sarah picked the solutions that would help Keith succeed in his tasks. In one task Keith attempted to grab for an unreachable object (see the left figure below). Sarah chose the option to […]
The #AS50 digital event concluded last week. The posts for this event coincided with the publication of a special issue of Memory & Cognition that celebrated the impact on cognitive science of a paper published by Richard C. Atkinson and Richard M. Shiffrin in 1967. The paper, given the hashtag #AS50 for our event, reported […]
Oh dang. It happened again. I walked into a room full of people and experienced retrieval failure. It’s a birthday party and although I’ve met most people on the host’s previous birthdays, some of the guest only look vaguely familiar. A woman greets me (she knows my name) and asks me about my recent trip. […]