According to Google, there are approximately 2.2 billion mothers in the world. On average, a woman of reproductive age is likely to have 2.5 children across her lifetime. According to ourworldindata.org, the global fertility rate varies substantially across countries as seen in the graphic below. Mothers, Madres, Mamas Women account for 49.5% of our world’s […]
Whenever I visit a new city, one of my favorite things to do is go to the local natural history museum. I love seeing every color of the rainbow expressed in our earth’s gems and minerals, walking among the models of whale and dinosaur skeletons, and feeling humbled by the vastness of our universe. As […]
Ah, the power of swear words. Whether you curse like a sailor or never use foul language, we all know a swear word when we hear it. They have a special ability to convey one’s emotion with particular emphasis—whether grief, pain, anger, fear, desire, joy, or surprise. Sometimes, the most reasonable emotional reaction is a […]
One of my favorite parts in the development of a good friendship is the moment you realize that you’ve started to mimic each other. Take, for instance, the ridiculous way my high school friends and I started to mispronounce word “beverage” with an extra r: breverage. This didn’t stem from any speech difficulties or our […]
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 […]
While you might not think of it, your life and your experience of moving through the world is governed by innumerable sets of rules that you’ve learned. We tend not to think much about these rules or grammars, much less how we learn them, but they’re nearly as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. Imagine […]
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 […]
In this episode of All Things Cognition, I interviewed Anna Kosovicheva and Ben Wolfe (pictured below) about their research described in an article recently published in the Psychonomic Society journal, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. They co-authored the paper with the first Editor in Chief of another of the Society’s journals, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, Jeremy Wolfe. […]
Online interactions and robots are increasingly common. We spend more time on video calls and we interact more and more with virtual assistants, chatbots, and avatars. We have created new verbs: it almost feels more natural to say that we are “zooming” than “having a video call”. And certain names, like “Alexa”, may bring a […]
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 […]