People are capable of inferring many attributes of an object by wielding it. Pick up a hammer and you can get a fairly good idea of its length, width, and shape (an ability that is known as exteroception). You will also acquire information about the orientation of the hammer in your hand (exproprioception), and your […]
Sensation and Perception
Remember answering machines? Me neither, but this is why Seinfeld exists. When Jerry’s girlfriend, Sophie, leaves a message without stating her name (just, “it’s me!”), Jerry decides to call her back without stating his own name. Stripped of visual and contextual cues—Jerry’s face, what he’s wearing, his name—Sophie fails to identify him by just his […]
There are no new ideas in Hollywood. The top 12 grossing films in the US last year were all, in one way or another, derivative content (6 super hero films, 3 remakes, 2 sequels, and a Star Wars). The increasingly serialized nature of the film industry may derive from the rise in recent years of […]
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 […]
William James famously said that the world is “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” to an infant whose sensory apparatus is “assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once.” As adults, we continue to be assailed by stimuli, but out attentional apparatus permits us to deal with the blooming and buzzing confusion quite well. […]
In October 2010, an elderly white man boarded an Air Canada flight bound from Hong Kong to Vancouver. During the flight, this passenger visited the bathroom and emerged an Asian man in his early 20s. No, this wasn’t an episode of Scooby Doo, this was an actual case where a hyperrealistic mask was used to […]
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 […]
What is it we remember, and why? Research in cognitive psychology has provided a broad and often very reliable sketch of the variables that determine memory performance. For example, recall of words is better when word repetitions are spaced rather than massed. To learn the Lithuanian word for cookie, you are better off spreading apart […]
How long is a piece of string? We all know this proverbial and largely rhetorical question. We also probably assume that it has no right answer—indeed, that’s the point of this rhetorical question in the first place, namely to indicate that the issue under consideration does not have a meaningful answer. Enter the venerable BBC. […]
What are your favorite, best-ever movie quotes? Is it “I’ll have what she’s having”? Or “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”? What about “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”? If you are unsure, here is a list of the best 100 movie quotes of all time according to Hollywood. But […]