Do you ever have trouble recognizing a familiar face? I do from time to time. But frankly, I was surprised to know that there are individuals for whom this is beyond an occasional nuisance, and it profoundly affects their social and emotional lives because of a neurological condition called prosopagnosia. I first heard of prosopagnosia […]
Statistics and Methodology
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 […]
How stressed do you feel right now? To find out, take this assessment. I scored an 8, which puts me in the “you are stressed” category. I am not too surprised with my result given my own midlife status with two emerging adult children and too many responsibilities while attempting to return to “normal” in […]
“This chair is too big!” she exclaimed. So she sat in the second chair. “This chair is too big, too!” she whined. So she tried the last and smallest chair. “Ahhh, this chair is just right,” she sighed. But just as she settled down into the chair to rest, it broke into pieces! – Southey […]
Researchers have argued for centuries over two leading statistical approaches: Bayesian analysis and the Frequentist approach. Both holding their own complex (and convincing) reasoning, well-meaning researchers can all agree on the goal of their analyses: reaching conclusions with the least amount of bias and error. The war between Bayesians and Frequentists is likely far from […]
Let’s set the stage with a series of images. Each of these pictorial examples represents a different aspect of decision-making, which requires the ability to compare incoming stimuli quickly to behave appropriately. In the case of the flying stimuli in the first set of images, a human might be asked to categorize […]
One of the major head-scratchers that keep researchers of many disciplines awake at night is the concern about reproducibility of past experimental findings. As it emerges, only a fraction of existing experimental studies, when replicated with the same methodology and conducting the same analyses, returned results that are comparable to the original ones. This replication […]
When I was a kid, I had a pair of sunglasses that had little mirrors on the side of the lenses that allowed you to see what was happening behind you. I would walk around my neighborhood feeling so cool, like a bona fide Spy Kid. James Bond had nothing on me. I thought someday […]
Older adults are more motivated than younger adults to do well in lab studies. What does this mean for our understanding of cognitive aging? If you’re a psychologist who studies cognitive aging, chances are you recruit younger adults (18-22 years) from the college or university and older adults (65+ years) from the community and have […]
As researchers begin to focus more and more on the factors that support replicability and replication in cognitive psychology, they are increasingly turning toward online venues for data collection. Many experiments are still run in the lab with participants recruited from convenience samples because this gives researchers more control over their participants’ behavior, and often […]