Clutter is a fact of life. Wherever you look, there is clutter. Even the tidiest of tidy rooms will contain much visual clutter: some objects will be in front of others, thereby partially obscuring them. So if you need to reach for the cup that’s behind the toaster, then your visual system must work through […]
We are bombarded by stimuli almost every instant of every day. Even logging off Twitter provides only temporary relief before more information arrives that we have to deal with. Being able to inhibit unwanted responses to stimuli is therefore a critically important cognitive ability, and researchers have shown considerable interest in such inhibitory and control […]
I find that the older I get, the more I “accidentally a word.” And that’s before we get to autocorrect. Sometimes, word processor errors coupled with collaborative editing on a document mean that someone types the same word in their highlighted text as occurs in the next section of the text. Or, occasionally, people will […]
The idea of enhanced or superior memory is a theme that has long fascinated cognitive researchers and society in general. It has been the theme of various novels, films, and probably an equal number of academic journal articles. The single question motivating both works of fact and fiction is, what techniques might an individual employ […]
I don’t know about you, but I remember feeling pretty smug when the large Open Science Collaboration report showing that experiments in cognitive psychology were more replicable than experiments in social psychology was published. Apologies to my social psychologist friends. Rest assured, I get my just desserts. The number of participants you need to recruit […]
Humans are social beings. This has numerous implications: For example, we know what others know or can know, and so we do not use gestures to communicate when we talk on the phone. We are sensitive to social norms, and we typically conform with those norms—even if they are communicated by a computer. We are […]
In the late 90s, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks starred in the romantic comedy, “You’ve Got Mail”, which romanticized the idea of online dating and amplified AOL’s fame. “The Dating Game” Shortly after this movie, the year 2000 was the official start to dating websites with the release of eharmony, according to the “history of […]
The Psychonomic Society will have a new Digital Content Editor from 1 January 2020 onward. But that’s not the only change of the team: There have been two resignations, and one new appointment to the position of Digital Associate Editor. I am sad to say good-bye to Steve Weisberg and Anja Jambrozik. And I am […]
My term as Digital Content Editor of the Psychonomic Society will come to an end on 31 December. The next day, I will start serving on the Society’s Governing Board. Building up the Featured Content section and running this blog has been an extremely enjoyable experience during the last 5 years. We ran our first […]
One of my favorite xkcd comics is Settled. See below. It’s a cool example of statistical inference. Evidence accumulates for a null hypothesis without any new data coming in. The only thing that changes over time is the expectation under the counterfactual: if Bigfoot were real, the ubiquity of cell phone cameras means that we […]