The goal of cognitive science is to understand how the mind works. It is a peculiar aspect of this quest that cognitive science often seems to be as much about computers and software as it is about the human mind: There is an intriguing parallelism between developments in computer science and affiliated fields on the […]
It is truly remarkable what the mind can achieve through the process of reading. Take for example the message below. Were you able to interpret what this message says? Our ability to ‘read’ this combination of numbers and letters highlights the fact that reading (among other things) has become a deeply embedded feature of our […]
People often do multiple things at the same time. We can talk on the phone while stacking the dishwasher, and some university students seemingly know how to type messages on their cell phones while listening to a lecture. There are many occasions, however, when such multi-tasking breaks down or becomes dangerous. For example, notwithstanding how […]
Beloved childhood friends for many – A. A. Milne’s characters from the Hundred Acre Woods also presented models for various psychological disorders – anxiety (Piglet), obsessive-compulsive disorder (Rabbit), depression (Eeyore), ADHD (Tigger). In fact, there is a full body of scientific research examining the various disorders represented by each character, such as a study conducted […]
In his seminal work of science fiction, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams ponders a question, which turns out, unsurprisingly, to be difficult to answer: What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything? In the novel, a super-intelligent civilization builds a super-computer to answer the question. That super-computer cannot answer the […]
Finding your office key amidst your building key, the lab key, your house key, the other house key in case you need to cat-sit for a friend is like finding a needle in a haystack. People who have tons of keys develop elaborate organizational systems, clumping together keys for similar places―like the Psychology building―which can […]
What are little boys made of Snips & snails & puppy dogs tails And such are little boys made of. What are little girls made of Sugar & spice & all things nice This very popular rhyme, probably written by English author Robert Southey, has persisted in western culture for nearly two centuries. It embodies […]
Meet Amy, Rich, and George. They are participants in your study on the detectability of an English pea among a set of sugar snap pea distractors. All participants work diligently and quickly and yield the following results: Amy responds within 422 milliseconds on average, with an accuracy of around 88%. Rich is a little slower […]
Put Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman together and you get Rain Man, the Academy-Award winning story of an autistic savant—played by Hoffman who received the Best Actor award for his performance—who turns out to have many unexpected talents. The clip below shows one famous scene, in which Hoffman knows within seconds that the waitress dropped […]
In the late 1970s, a chimpanzee named Sarah watched a human named Keith struggle to complete simple tasks. When given various solutions, Sarah picked the solutions that would help Keith succeed in his tasks. In one task Keith attempted to grab for an unreachable object (see the left figure below). Sarah chose the option to […]