Bank tellers, masks, and morphs: Individual differences in face recognition

Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (CRPI) has released the first batch of articles in a special issue dedicated to individual differences in face recognition. Karen Lander, Markus Bindemann, and I have co-organised this special issue. This post is based on the editorial overview that appears with the articles. In a narrative review of the topic […]

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Automatic detection of automatic response generators: How to improve data quality in online research

In recent years, researchers have started using Amazon Mechanical Turk and similar services to collect data from online participants. Two big benefits are the speed and ease of data collection. A study that might take a year to run using a participant pool at a small university could now be completed in a day, and […]

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Dogs understand what’s written all over your face

Perhaps like no other animal, dogs have been offering companionship to us humans for millennia. Indeed, it has been suggested that dogs have been partners in our evolutionary journey. Dogs split from grey wolves more than 30,000 years ago. Since then, the brains and some other organs of domestic dogs have evolved in ways that […]

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When real-time looks more benign: Fouls in slo-mo are penalized more severely by soccer referees

Those of you who are soccer fans may find the following passage easy to follow: “In a new age for football, AZ had a goal against Cambuur disallowed for a foul on the keeper after the decision was reviewed. Stijn Wuytens thought he had won the game for his side only to be called back […]

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One for the money, one for the show: Neural activation changes when intending to gamble on versus intending to watch soccer

On Monday, May 14th, 2018 the US Supreme Court effectively legalized sports gambling. Of course, prior to that ruling, sports gambling had been possible in the US, in various forms, online (one-day fantasy sports contests, like DraftKings) and through offshore betting venues. While fans had ample opportunity to wager on the performances of individual players […]

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To Procrastinate or to Precrastinate? – That is the question, whether pigeon or human

Last January, I celebrated the end of my sabbatical with a trip to a tropical paradise to conduct research, right before my next teaching term began. This enabled me to trade the middle of winter in south Texas for this: Paradise “lost”. To prepare for my forthcoming blog deadlines (and to avoid procrastination in its […]

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Men take shortcuts, women may follow the Zhuangzi: Sex differences in navigation

Search for “can women read maps?” and Google will reward you with more than 300,000,000 hits. I haven’t read them all but the first few hits are pretty clear in their verdict, namely that women cannot read maps. And the book, “Why men don’t listen and women can’t read maps” is likely at the top […]

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#psAmsterdam18: A retrospective on the meeting and expert opinions

The International Meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Amsterdam wrapped up on Saturday (12 May). The meeting was attended by around 700 delegates and featured keynote addresses by John Wixted and Dedre Gentner. Some photos of the meeting are available on the Society’s website. The meeting also featured 7 symposia: Tackling the Confidence Crisis with […]

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#PSDiversityandInclusion: Providing a permanent home for the discussion

The last two weeks leading up to the international meeting in Amsterdam (more on that soon) were taken up with a series of posts that discussed issues surrounding diversity and inclusion in the Psychonomic Society and in science generally. This #PSDiversityandInclusion digital event was our largest to date with 8 posts spread over two weeks, […]

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