How might a road tell you what to expect, and would this keep everyone who uses it safer? Since it’s probably a bad idea to have the road start to talk to drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, how should we design it so that everyone who uses it can do so safely? This question has interested […]
People signal their gender identity by using gendered and gender-neutral pronouns pronouns. It’s increasingly popular to include one’s preferred pronouns in email signatures, Twitter bios, etc. This usage provides an opportunity to research how people understand language. In this interview, I speak with Jennifer Arnold (pictured below) about her paper on the topic recently published in Psychonomic […]
As a cognitive psychology professor, I have always loved showing students the never-failing McGurk effect in perception class. After all, who isn’t intrigued by how reliable this effect is? No matter how much you know about it and how many times you have seen or heard the stimuli before, it works. The McGurk effect is the experience […]
Imagine your morning routine: First, you’re about to take a shower. You turn on the water and wait for it to heat up while you undress. Although you’ve never kept track, you know exactly when to step into the shower to avoid a shock from the cold water. Now imagine you’re making some coffee. You […]
Olivia Newton’s Physical is a great song (so is the video!). This 1980’s classic candidly describes the experience of sexual desire without leaving out the feelings of reduced self-control that sometimes come with it (“It’s gettin’ hard this holdin’ back / If you know what I mean” [music intensifies]). Sexual arousal has been associated with positive emotions and can […]
Sometimes, it seems like the most simple tasks are also the most frustrating. Take the junk drawer in your kitchen, for example. They’re in every home, we’re not proud of them, and whenever we spend several minutes looking for the vegetable peeler when cooking dinner, we promise ourselves that one day, we will get this […]
I think I am not alone when I say I love a good magic trick! Whether fascinatingly complicated or wonderfully simple, magic tricks can garner the interest of even the greatest skeptic. Famous magicians throughout time include, Harry Houdini (the master of Escapology), David Copperfield (the Great Storyteller and Illusionist), and David Blaine (the Endurance […]
Here’s a disconcerting thought: what if the baggage screener at the airport – not that many of us are spending much time in airports these days – got paid a bonus for confidently flagging bags for additional inspection? In an ideal world, they would just assess bags based on the perceptual information they have from […]
Once upon a time, Kepler and Descartes proposed that vergence is the critical absolute distance cue. And that theory lived happily ever after. Until Paul Linton‘s paper. In this podcast, I interview Paul (pictured below) about his work published in the Psychonomic Society journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics. Learn about longstanding theories and Linton’s research […]
Imagine for a moment, the wind blowing through your hair, your skin glistening with the slightest sheen of moisture, a steady breath in and out, and your feet softly caressing the pavement as you place one foot in front of the other with the grace of a cheetah while the moon shines down. Unfortunately, my […]