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 […]
Let’s get this post started with a cognitive science themed trivia question. What’s the name of the intelligence component comprising declarative and procedural knowledge learnt by an individual throughout their life span? The answer is: crystallized intelligence. Information such as the number of different words a person knows (vocabulary size) and the ability to retrieve […]
I’m pleased to introduce you to our new Digital Associate Editor (DAE), Melinh Lai (pictured below). If you read her post authored in a guest capacity, you are already familiar with her. In the interview with Melinh, I asked my now-standard DAE questions and was entertained by her thoughtful, clever, humorous responses and I suspect […]
What does being in nature actually do for us? In the last couple of years, when we’ve all been in lockdown and had to work from home for prolonged periods, we’ve each probably thought “I should get out of the house and get some fresh air” – but does that help in more than the […]
If you watched the Academy Award winning film, CODA (trailer below), you’ll appreciate that the character who played the son is a native signer. That is, he learned sign language from his parents from the start. How do we learn spatial relations? It’s a fundamental ability we pick up early. Much of what we know […]
Rhyming verses may make you think of Shakespearean sonnets or old-fashioned love poems. Yet, rhymes are ubiquitous in modern life. We remember how to spell words by repeating “i before e, except after c,” and the number of days in the months through “Thirty days hath September …,” Attorneys admonish jurors that “if it doesn’t […]
In fourth grade, I learned to play the trumpet. Although my very musically inclined father attempted to teach me piano before then, my band director gets the credit for teaching me to read the music. Two key mnemonics were instrumental in my success in remembering the treble clef notes. Treble clef notes are the upper […]
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 […]
Did you watch an interview where Robert Downey Jr. says he’s coming back as Iron Man or did you just read an avid fan theory on Reddit? Was it your mother or anatomy professor who said bubble gum would stay in your stomach for seven years? Whether you’re sharing celebrity gossip or submitting a homework […]