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 […]
Sensation and Perception
Once upon a time, Kepler and Descartes proposed that vergence is the critical absolute distance cue. And that theory lived happily ever after. Until Paul Linton‘s paper. In this podcast, I interview Paul (pictured below) about his work published in the Psychonomic Society journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics. Learn about longstanding theories and Linton’s research […]
Ever notice how speed texting seems to be a young person’s game? Most Gen Zs and Millennials send messages from their smart phones much faster than their parents and grandparents. As such, tech companies have created settings specifically to make smart phone use easier for the elderly. One explanation is that tactile acuity declines as […]
Will computers ever think like us? And if they do, how would we know? In 1950, Alan Turing proposed that computers could be considered intelligent if an observer can no longer distinguish which of two partners in a conversation is a “real” human and which is a computer. To date, no computer has passed this […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
We owe most of our visual acuity to the fovea, the central area of the retina that is most densely packed with receptors—around 150,000 cones per square millimetre. Whenever we focus on an object, we move our eyes so ensure that the image is projected onto the fovea. And we see whatever is there, irrespective of […]