Carrying out a sequence of actions is something we do every day without thinking much about it—like when we cook. We first gather ingredients, then clean, chop, and arrange them so they are ready for cooking. Each step follows the previous one, requiring cognitive control to stay on track. But for people with mental health […]
Sensation and Perception
In this All Things Cognition podcast, I interview Matt Evans and Nicolas Davidenko about their recent paper on the pitch of earworms. Let’s get right into it! Interview Transcript Lai: You’re listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast. Now here’s your host, Laura Mickes. Mickes: Having a song stuck in your head is […]
We’ll start this one off with a bit of a test. Have a look at the images below – can you guess what they are? You might find a judgment like this a bit difficult, and tasks like this reveal that visual perception is much more than simply registering an image. To do this accurately, […]
A harsh review can sometimes feel like a wrecking ball to one’s work, and, as academic lore has it, it’s often ‘Reviewer 2’ who wields the ball. However, a critical review I received in the late 1990s became a turning point in my research, thanks to Larry Barsalou’s (1999) groundbreaking article on perceptual symbol systems. […]
Writing tributes isn’t my strongest suit, but when it comes to Larry, I’ll just tell it like it is (and no, this isn’t an endorsement of Donald Trump). I’ve spent most of my academic career immersed in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Science. My primary focus has always been on what some might consider the more mundane […]
When you are as thoughtful, intellectually curious, and gracious as Larry Barsalou is, you can inspire others without even knowing it. While I have never been lucky enough to work with Larry closely as a mentee or a colleague, my career would not be what it is today without his personal influence. To understand Larry’s […]
I am extremely happy to be part of a tribute for Larry Barsalou. Having worked on word meaning, concepts, and related issues for a number of years, Larry’s ideas have strongly influenced me, just like they continue to influence a large number of young and older researchers. Larry’s work on ad hoc concepts, embodied/grounded cognition, […]
In the mid-1990’s, I was extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to explore how conceptual/semantic information was represented in the human brain. One of these studies, published in Science in 1995, focused on the neural systems underpinning retrieval of information about the object-associated color and action, the other, published in Nature in 1996, focused on […]
Have you ever visited a foreign country or region and found your own speech being influenced by the accent of the native people? Or perhaps you live far from home, and when you go back, your speech shifts back to the local accent? This happens to me every time I visit my family in Baltimore, […]
Have you ever had the experience of talking with someone and partway through, you realize that while you both might be using the same vocabulary, what you mean is quite different? Sometimes, this comes from a generational gap. Slang words change frequently, and some words don’t have the same meaning that they once did. For […]