One of the greatest (and, in my opinion, most overlooked) aspects of science is that it is a process inherently founded on and driven by community. Almost all ongoing research questions are derived from prior research, and the outputs of ongoing research will inevitably inspire new lines of work and discovery. Scientific discoveries are ultimately […]
Vision
Humans are quite skilled at detecting patterns subconsciously. If you listen to a new song for the first time, you can probably follow the beat or predict how the melody will change next. If you go into a new grocery store, you can probably navigate to the potatoes based on your experience in other stores. […]
If you’ve never heard of freestyle slalom skating before, prepare to be amazed. In this sport, roller skaters skillfully maneuver their way around a set of tightly spaced cones at mind-boggling speeds, balancing on one skate, skating backwards, or sometimes both! If you ever want to watch some impressive feats of athleticism and artistry on […]
We’ll start this one off with a bit of a test. Have a look at the images below – can you guess what they are? You might find a judgment like this a bit difficult, and tasks like this reveal that visual perception is much more than simply registering an image. To do this accurately, […]
Have you ever had the experience of talking with someone and partway through, you realize that while you both might be using the same vocabulary, what you mean is quite different? Sometimes, this comes from a generational gap. Slang words change frequently, and some words don’t have the same meaning that they once did. For […]
I started trail running a year ago. I was an avid hiker, so I assumed that a marginal increase in my speed wouldn’t pose too much of a challenge. The bruises on my hands and legs served as stark reminders of my naiveté. However, despite the rocky start (pun intended), I gradually learned how to […]
Have you ever noticed that restaurants often advertise their food with vibrant, bright colors—highlighting every juicy morsel of the meal? The reasoning is simple: colorful photography makes the food more appetizing and makes us (the viewer) more likely to buy it. Some believe that this type of advertising even contributes to overeating habits when marketing […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]