Sensation and Perception

#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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Facilitating your fovea’s focus by crowding your periphery: Visual crowding in 3-D

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 […]

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When Rain Man meets Braille: Tactile Subitizing and Numerosity Estimates

Put Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman together and you get Rain Man, the Academy-Award winning story of an autistic savant—played by Hoffman who received the Best Actor award for his performance—who turns out to have many unexpected talents. The clip below shows one famous scene, in which Hoffman knows within seconds that the waitress dropped […]

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You can obscure a lot by just plotting: Cognitive science of data presentation

“They began three and a half centuries ago,” writes Gernsbacher (2018, p. 403). They can delight us or frighten us, teach us and confuse us, intimidate us or encourage us. They are the base unit of productivity and the currency of academic prestige and advancement. “They,” of course, are scientific journal articles. The professional academic […]

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Safety Helmets: Dr. Jekyll when you crash but Mr. Hyde when you are judging distances?

Humans have a sort Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde relationship with safety devices, such as helmets. For example, on the one hand bicycle helmets are known to reduce serious head injuries (by 70%, it turns out). On the other hand, helmets might also lead to more risky behavior. For instance, cyclists are often thought to ride faster […]

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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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