If attention were a muscle, most of us would swear ours had been skipping leg day. One minute you’re reading an email, the next you’re three tabs deep into a recipe for a croquembouche that looks like a “Kraken bush”—and you don’t remember how you got there. Psychologists call the ability to stay on task […]
Statistics and Methodology
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 […]
If you’ve ever checked your smartwatch to see how stressed you are, you’re part of a growing group of people—and scientists—turning to wearable tech for insights about the body and mind. From smart rings to VR headsets, wearables are everywhere. But for researchers, a big question remains: which of these devices produces accurate, reliable data? […]
There’s a mean (not really) but funny (maybe only to me) trick I like to play on my students that starts with a lesson on an experiment. It works for almost any kind of cognitive psychology study, and I start it by walking my students through the design of an experiment—the research question, important variables, […]
Would you ever hand over your private messages for the sake of scientific research? These days, so much of our social lives happen through texts and social media messages. These interactions are all rich sources of data that social psychologists and other researchers would love to study to better understand real-world social behavior. As a […]
As RuPaul famously says, “Reading is fundamental.” It forms the foundation of how we learn, communicate, and engage with the world around us. That’s why it’s essential to have good, reliable ways to measure reading ability. A parent might do this by asking their child to sound words out or try reading a sentence. Researchers, […]
There are some who might scoff at it, but I’m always a bit charmed to meet someone who puts their fingers and thumbs in the classic “L” and “reversed L” formations to differentiate between left and right. And although I usually don’t need to do this, it seems to be a relatable enough experience to at […]
It’s easy to think of mental states like depression or anxiety as lists of unrelated symptoms. Even though it’s helpful to think about each individual symptom, it’s also important to remember that symptoms can be related to each other in complex ways. That’s the main idea behind network psychometrics, where psychologists examine the relationships between […]
How do we build true novelty? We have new experiences all the time (maybe reading a blog post about a scientific article is one, and if it is, welcome!), but studying how we learn about new items and new categories poses significant challenges. I mean, we could spend a lot of time trying to learn […]
“But when does lack of ‘simplicity’ in the protective belt of theoretical adjustments reach the point at which the theory must be abandoned?” – Lakatos, 1976 What does it take to falsify a psychological theory? This question sounds straightforward: if you find data that are inconsistent with the theory, you reject the theory. But in […]