Recognition

Visual long-term memory is massive, but only if the memories are meaningful

How well do you remember detailed visual information, such as the precise color or shape of an object you saw several hours ago? Although intuition might suggest that our memory for fine details is quite poor, research finds that visual long-term memory has a massive capacity for visual details of objects and scenes. For instance, after […]

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A closer look at the hidden faces of face recognition impairment: Excluded cases from prosopagnosia research

Do you ever have trouble recognizing a familiar face? I do from time to time. But frankly, I was surprised to know that there are individuals for whom this is beyond an occasional nuisance, and it profoundly affects their social and emotional lives because of a neurological condition called prosopagnosia. I first heard of prosopagnosia […]

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Taking it all in: Holistic processing of words and faces

As you try to make sense of this sentence, do you find yourself looking at individual letters, or processing each word automatically? If you are an expert English reader, you probably said the latter. Evidence suggests that at least some word recognition occurs due to holistic processing, or perceptually integrating letters into a unitary whole. […]

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Deliberately monitoring your memory can sometimes lead to more memory errors

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 […]

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Comparing early and late signers’ links between spatial language and memory

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 […]

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Roses are red, violets are blue, rhyme improves memory, for me and for you

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 […]

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Musical spaces or spatial music: Is music reading special or a specialized skill?

In fourth grade, I learned to play the trumpet. Although my very musically inclined father attempted to teach me piano before then, my band director gets the credit for teaching me to read the music. Two key mnemonics were instrumental in my success in remembering the treble clef notes. Treble clef notes are the upper […]

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Does competition boost your memory?

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 […]

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Interview with Jennifer Coane about the memorability of tweets

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 […]

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