Play is rich and fascinating; it is also strange and puzzling. It is playing all kinds of tricks with seriously-minded thinkers and researchers. Play is easy to recognize in children below one year of age, yet professors at the zenith of their play-research career are struggling to work out a simple and useful definition of […]
In contrast to the animal play that is covered in the special issue of Learning & Behavior dedicated to The Evolutionary and Psychological Significance of Play, humans often use elaborate representation (language and other symbols) in their play. An example that occurs during contemporary Christmas season is the elf-on-the-shelf. By the time I visited homes […]
The Digital Event on The Evolutionary and Psychological Significance of Play got under way yesterday with an overview post. Today is the first day of this event, and it serves to introduce the special issue of the Psychonomic Society’s journal Learning & Behavior on which it is based. In June of 2016, the Chicago Zoological […]
We all know what it means to play. We play badminton, we play with others, we are playfully exploring an environment…. Come to think of it, there is so much to playing, what does it mean to play? According to the Oxford English dictionary, the verb “play” has 7 different meanings, ranging from “Engaging in […]
Replication and reanalysis of old data is critical to doing good science. We have discussed at various points how to increase the replicability of studies (e.g. here, here, here, and here), and have covered a few meta-analyses (here, here). Maybe it is because technology is constantly changing, and because we forget where we leave files […]
The start of a Formula 1 Grand Prix is always exciting and adrenalin producing, even if you watch it on TV from thousands of miles away and keep the noise level below the pain threshold. (A Formula 1 cockpit is one of the loudest places on Earth.) Have a look at a start of a […]
How long is a piece of string? We all know this proverbial and largely rhetorical question. We also probably assume that it has no right answer—indeed, that’s the point of this rhetorical question in the first place, namely to indicate that the issue under consideration does not have a meaningful answer. Enter the venerable BBC. […]
Smiles are . . . Powerful. Infectious. Uplifting. . . .and Aging? In my younger days, I refereed high school and collegiate basketball and was often told that I needed to stop smiling on the court. As one of my colleagues said, smiling made me look young, too attractive, not serious enough, and like I […]
Memory researchers love chess. Chess experts have been studied by psychologists to try to explain the role of higher-level processing in memory. One reason chess is a great domain in which to ask these questions is because its rules and concepts provide meaning to the spatial positions of the pieces only if one knows them. […]
Memory can be quite fickle. Sometimes we remember the things we desire most to forget and forget the things we diligently seek to remember. This had led to the popularity of such phrases as, I never forget a face (if you are like Willy Wonka) or how could I ever forget (if you are like […]