Three years ago, I bought a new car that had a keyless push start. It took almost six months of driving before I stopped trying to put my key into the ignition. Each time I tried to put an imaginary key into the imaginary ignition slot, I shook my head and laughed at myself. My […]
Memory is such a fickle thing. Have you ever found yourself forgetting things that you should have remembered and remembered things that you should have forgotten? This happens to me all the time! I can completely forget where I placed my cell phone, even if placed minutes ago. However, I can remember lyrics to a […]
Should you have to be a data archeologist with open data? Have you ever come back to a dataset a few years after collecting it, and scratched your head over what Past You was thinking and what the variables and labels mean? Now, imagine it’s not Past You, but another researcher, and you are trying […]
The night before a big exam, college students may attempt to “study” by listening to their recorded notes while they fall asleep. They may feel that processing the information before sleep will help them remember it better the next day. A number of studies have shown this to be effective, even though it didn’t help […]
One of life’s most difficult challenges is keeping information a secret, even when well-intentioned. Imagine you need to plan a surprise party for your dad. You send out the invitations, order a cake, and buy the decorations. When you’re talking over these details with your brother, he suddenly looks toward the door. Naturally, you look […]
Imagine learning how to read and play music for the first time. It starts with a series of dots and lines thrown around on a piece of paper. Soon you learn how to interpret these so-called notes. You assign a letter name to each note, and then you figure out how to produce that note […]
What’s SpongeBob Squarepants’ claim to fame besides being an animated cheese-looking, blockhead sponge under-the-sea main character of a children’s cartoon with catchy song lyrics? Apparently, aside from the possible influence on decreased attention span in children, the creators of SpongeBob SquarePants weren’t too far off in their character portrayal of different sea creatures, including the […]
Attention is a key part of cognition, and, therefore, it plays an important role across almost any context you can imagine. It’s critical for behaviors as diverse as air traffic control and keeping track of predators and influences outcomes with high relevance (such as academic performance). It is also sensitive to many factors such as […]
If you’re an educator, you’ve probably wondered how many of your students are paying attention as you deliver course content in class. Although most research on mind wandering has been conducted in the laboratory, understanding when and why students mind wander during class can have important implications for how we teach and design our learning […]
We’ll start this one off with a trivia question (and perhaps a bad joke). What do astronomers and researchers who study eye movements have in common? For one, they both have a keen interest in orbits! The other thing they have in common? When describing eye movements, vision researchers use a term that’s actually borrowed […]