The own-race bias in face processing is a well-known effect that refers to the fact that people generally find it easier to identify faces of people of their own race. Although the general effect has been known for decades, the source of the bias is not well understood. There are a number of broad explanations […]
What percentage of Americans are Muslim? What percentage of Americans are LGBT individuals? What percentage of Americans are Christian? Think about it and take real guesses. If you are like the average person, your guesses were likely overestimates of the real numbers for the smaller percentages (for Muslims; for LGBT), and underestimates for the larger […]
Harvey, Irma, Jose, … and now Maria. Hurricanes have been wreaking havoc in the tropical and subtropical Atlantic for much of the past few months. Their power and consequences fueled by climate change, we can expect more hurricanes that are followed by the retirement of their names: When a named storm was particularly destructive and […]
Are you feeling 🙂 today? Or perhaps 🙁 ? In the modern digital world, we are all conversant with emoticons and emojis. But when you come across the ? emoji, do you know what it means? According to a new article on the Lisbon Emoji and Emoticon Database (LEED), published in the Psychonomic Society’s journal […]
A computational model of mental processing speed in drivers who are holding a conversation suggests that having a passenger in the car is not a distraction, but it does make us more cautious and slower to make decisions. A reality of living in much of the United States and many other parts of the world […]
Our digital event on the processes of explanation came to a conclusion on Friday. The series of 6 posts covered various aspects of the special issue of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, guest edited by Andrei Cimpian and Frank Keil, that was dedicated to the psychology of explanations. However, this does not mean that the […]
What’s stopping scientists from building a machine that provides sensible explanations? Let’s be clear: what we need is a machine that explains simple matters, not free will or the plot of Inception. For instance, how would you respond if I asked you why apples don’t grow underground? Perhaps you’d say, “Because apples are a type […]
Explanation matters. Explanation is a central part of coming to an understanding of the world around us. So it is no surprise that the question of what makes “a good explanation” has been a long-standing interest of philosophers, in particular philosophers of science. Their work, in turn, has influenced and motivated psychologists interested in everyday […]
We all see things through the lens of our own interests, and one of my interests is in the limitations of formal models for thinking in general and scientific thinking in particular. Consider as a formal model one that is applicable no matter the content area. The equation 2+2=4 is a formal model, because it […]
The word that came to mind as I read the collection of articles in the special issue of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review dedicated to the processes of explanation was “progress.” The nature of explanation has of course been a core concern of cognitive scientists ever since there have been cognitive scientists. Yet, with a few important […]