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 […]
Sensation and Perception
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 […]
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 […]