There is a brief flash on the screen—just 1/10th of a second. A few color patches are flashed, and 2 seconds later another array appears that stays on the screen until you respond. Your task is to decide whether any one of the patches of color in the second array differs from the colors briefly […]

Understanding the factors that have shaped the evolution of intelligence is a fundamental issue in animal cognition. The social intelligence hypothesis suggests that the physical environment does not present the kind of challenges that lead to the evolution of a flexible, intelligent mind, whereas the social environment does. The hypothesis suggests that social animals will be either […]

When riding on a bus or the subway these days, I tend to be surrounded by people who seem to exist in a different space. With vacant eyes, they look like they have successfully separated themselves from their perceptual environment. The secret weapon against outside intrusion of their own thoughts seems to be a set […]

Does “brain training” make you smarter, more alert, and (cognitively) younger all around? If you pay for brain training software, is that a smart investment? The people who sell this software presumably think so. But not everyone agrees. The websites of the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development recently posted […]

In an increasingly globalized world, one of the most important things we have to do is understand people from different parts of the world and the things they say. Not only are there an estimated 5,000 different languages on Earth today, but also the number of non-native speakers of English vastly outnumbers the number of […]

We learn at a young age that we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, smell with our noses. The clear anatomical differences between these sense organs appear to map intuitively on how we think about the different perceptual modalities. The scientific study of perception is likewise largely divided along these modal lines. Someone […]

Psychologists from the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at University College London (UCL) have launched a unique international competition, with a $10,000 prize, to find the best way of tackling a memory problem faced by millions of people every day, namely how best to learn foreign language vocabulary. Dr Rosalind Potts and I have teamed up […]

If people’s memory for past events was entirely accurate and if people could only act on things they remembered, our ability to survive in the world would be severely curtailed. This may sound provocative (it is) and counter-intuitive (it is) but it’s also commonly accepted as true. Why? Because if all you remembered about certain […]