Multisensory Integration

Tonight the Prince of higher cognition will give a ball. Will #time4action be invited?

Once upon a time, in the realm of psychology, a haughty woman summoned her two beloved daughters – perception and attention – and said them: “Tonight the Prince of higher cognition will give a ball. All persons of fashion are invited – including you, my darlings.” Her stepdaughter – action – was listening, too. But […]

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#time4action: Resynthesizing cognition – how we should re-make our psychology text books based on evolution and behaviour?

Very few papers attempt to overturn over 100 years of thinking about how cognitive sciences should be organised, and even fewer succeed.  The article by Paul Cisek in the #time4action special issue of the Psychonomic Society’s journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics takes aim at the overarching division of cognitive sciences into the chapters we learn […]

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#time4action: Action in Focus for an Integrative Approach to the Mind

This #time4action special issue of Attention, Perception & Psychophysics is exciting. Joo-Hyun Song and Timothy Welsh have assembled a large and impressive set of articles highlighting the importance of action for understanding cognition. In general, the special issue illustrates how cognition and action (and perception, too) are highly integrated aspects of what we call “the […]

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#time4action in its Ascendancy: It’s Time for the Ball

This #time4action special issue of Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, edited by Joo-Hyun Song and Timothy Welsh, is a tour de force for which they should be applauded. To narrow my comments enough to fit in this space, I will focus mostly on the article by David Rosenbaum and Iman Feghhi, The Time for Action is […]

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#time4action: Using eyegaze to understand object-related action and goal knowledge

I was hurriedly looking through a messy drawer the other day in search of a retractable tape measure for a project I was working on around the house.  A roll of adhesive tape caught my attention.  No, not that.  Then I reached for a ruler.  Nope―that wasn’t quite what I was looking for, either.  I […]

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Overcoming babble with a bubble: “Seeing” speech can make language faster to process

Recently, an error was found in this paper. The updated paper is here. —– Do you like talking on the phone to strangers? No? Well, neither do I. And for good reason – talking to someone you do not know over noisy speakers that lose part of the sound spectrum can be challenging, especially if […]

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The good, the bad, and the media multi-tasking: It’s all the internet’s fault. Or is it?

Apparently the internet, video games, and social media are damaging our children’s development, and are responsible for the increase in autism over the last few decades—or so it has been claimed, although that claim hasn’t withstood scrutiny. Similarly, Wikipedia has an entry for something known as Internet addiction disorder, which apparently occurs when internet use […]

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Making sense of 20 cents: Multimodal auditory pitch perception

Many of us have the impression that gestures and exaggerated facial expressions help us understand others in loud environments such as bars or conference parties. Speech perception in many contexts is multimodal – we incorporate visual information when trying to make sense of what someone else is saying. These cues are so consistently predictive of […]

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How the takete got its spikes: Why some words sound like what they are

Human beings have an incredible capability to communicate. Unlike other species, humans have evolved to use language to express our states, desires, observations, and, I guess, tweet about them. Language is a powerful system of communication because it allows the expression of counterfactuals: we can easily discuss the past and future; distant, unseen locations; complex […]

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