Close your eyes for a moment and think about the past year. Now imagine mapping out your plans for the upcoming year. If you had to point to a location that corresponds to “tomorrow” or “next month,” where would it be? What about “yesterday”? Chances are, next month is somewhere to the right of tomorrow. […]
Sensation and Perception
Have you ever noticed how movies often depict different places using distinct color palettes? Stories happening in Mexico and the Old West, for example, are frequently portrayed with sepia tones, evoking nostalgia or toughness, while movies set in cold places or warzones are often portrayed as being grayish – or technically speaking, with decreased color […]
Unfortunately for me, one of the first things I see most mornings is an ad. It’s largely my fault—I have the extremely terrible habit of keeping my phone next to me at night and then an arguably worse habit of checking Twitter (excuse me, X) in the morning, leading me to inevitably scroll past an […]
You may not get a second chance to make a first impression, but how important are first impressions really? According to the authors of an article recently published in the Psychonomic Society’s journal Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, “Human beings live in a social environment that functions through the establishment of hierarchies, with individuals acting as […]
Have you ever noticed that restaurants often advertise their food with vibrant, bright colors—highlighting every juicy morsel of the meal? The reasoning is simple: colorful photography makes the food more appetizing and makes us (the viewer) more likely to buy it. Some believe that this type of advertising even contributes to overeating habits when marketing […]
November is here. The leaves changed from green into vibrant yellows, oranges, and reds and carpeted the streets. The air chilled, so my winter clothes reappeared, replacing my summer clothes, as I braced myself for the colder months ahead. Root vegetables supplanted fresh salads on my menus. For me, an American in the UK, November […]
For those of us who enjoy science fiction (and even of those of us who don’t), the word ‘robot’ conjures up images of humanlike machines, perhaps C-3PO, WALL-E, Baymax, or one of the Transformers. Of course, outside of science fiction, when we consider the definition of a robot – a machine that completes complex tasks […]
Einstein’s theory of special relativity suggests that time passes at a different rate depending on the speed of your movement. Time is relative and depends on one’s movement. However, a certain amount of time can still feel really different to each of us, even when we are not traveling near the speed of light (like […]
We’ll start this one off with a trivia question (and perhaps a bad joke). What do astronomers and researchers who study eye movements have in common? For one, they both have a keen interest in orbits! The other thing they have in common? When describing eye movements, vision researchers use a term that’s actually borrowed […]
As a cognitive psychology professor, I have always loved showing students the never-failing McGurk effect in perception class. After all, who isn’t intrigued by how reliable this effect is? No matter how much you know about it and how many times you have seen or heard the stimuli before, it works. The McGurk effect is the experience […]