The annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in New Orleans drew to a close a little over a week ago. Following tradition (anything that lasts more than 3 years is surely a tradition?), one of my incredibly helpful elves again surveyed a few posters by junior researchers during several of the poster sessions. I interviewed […]
How many U.S. presidents can you name? (Apologies to our international audience.) Regardless of how many you can recall, I would bet that among the ones you did remember are Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Trump, Obama, and Bush. I would also bet that among the ones you did not remember are McKinley, Hoover, and Cleveland. Don’t […]
The Psychonomic Society has been actively upgrading its digital presence—not just here, on the Featured Content site, but also during our annual meetings. We have been tweeting with our own hashtag for several years, and this year we are taking several extra steps. Live tweeting The hashtag for this year’s meeting is #psynom18. Everybody is […]
The annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society will commence a week from today. The Society is looking forward to welcoming you to New Orleans. The program has been posted and the mobile app is available for download. The Society is urging everyone who is planning to attend to register online rather than onsite. (My best guess is that you have […]
With the increased demand for computer programming skills in industries outside of technology, younger and younger kids are now taught the basics of computer science to prepare for future jobs. For example, when Amazon launched a program aiming to teach 10 million kids a year to code last week, it was because the company was […]
Suppose I were to show you three different objects – a Jeep, Honda, and Ferrari. You could quickly name their shared category as “car”. Pigeons, honeybees, dogs, rats, and a variety of primates can answer that question just as fast as a human, after sufficient experience. Even more impressive is that all of these species can […]
The main purpose of this blog is to showcase current research that has appeared in the journals of the Psychonomic Society. Anyone who publishes in a Psychonomic Society journal is invited, in the acceptance letter, to contact the Digital Content Editor to nominate their article for a blogpost. This is the principal process by which […]
Visual working memory (VWM) refers to our ability to hold in memory, for relatively brief amounts of time, an array of arbitrary shapes or colors that are not easily verbalized. For example, consider the stimulus below: When this is shown for 1/10th of a second, and is then replaced by a blank screen or some […]
Have you ever had a conversation with someone who constantly averted their gaze? Why do you think that is? If you are like most people, you might suspect a myriad of reasons, with most being categorically not good. You might suspect that your conversational partner is socially uncomfortable, disinterested in the conversation, hiding something, or […]
Language and music unfold in time in similar ways. Just like we do not produce an arbitrary sequence of words, music follows a set of principles, and notes that fail to follow them can sound “ungrammatical.” Both language and music also often show hierarchical structure, with the pace of speech and music often having what […]