So you drive a car? Then please tell me how the differential works. And if that’s too hard, can you tell me how the windshield wipers do their job? Explaining the former may be difficult, but surely it’s quite straightforward to explain how wipers wipe water off your windshield. What is an explanation? How to […]
The NIH has posted a new version of Case 18. If that sentence means nothing to you, you might want to visit my post from last week, “Basic research can be open and transparent without being a clinical trial” in which I summarized the problem with the NIH’s plan to label much of human behavioral […]
Visual search can be a very daunting task, whether it’s looking for keys among a pile of office supplies on a desk, or looking for a dime among a bunch of coins in your purse. It seems like no matter how many times you have checked and re-checked certain locations, the object of your affection […]
What’s the first thing that comes to mind in response to “Italian”? Lots of things probably, from Lamborghini to cannelloni and Bertolucci. Perhaps you also thought of how Italians talk. Even if we don’t speak Italian, we probably know that Italians do a lot of talking with their hands: in case you have any doubt, […]
I would not classify most of my experiments as clinical trials, but now, under NIH rules that become effective in 2018, much of my work along with a significant portion of basic human behavioral research will be classified as clinical trials. This change is motivated by worthy goals but, in its current form, it has […]
Attachments to other people – you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them. Kevin Bacon in his classic role as Ren McCormack in “Footloose” is a bad boy teenager who reminds the straight-laced minister (played by John Lithgow) and his quiet town that dancing is also important in leading a fulfilling life. A social […]
When a person “doesn’t know right from left”, they are metaphorically confused, or unable to navigate the world. In the non-metaphorical meaning of the phrase, we’re talking about a person whose concepts of right and left are somehow undeveloped – and telling left from right is an ability that we definitely need in order to […]
“Progress is not possible without deviation.” — Frank Zappa The ways by which psychological science deals with methodological problems are many. There are bottom-up approaches such as peer-reviewed papers and workshops given by methodologists who advocate particular types of changes. There are also top-down approaches, such as funding agencies requiring data sharing or journals requiring […]
We are constantly bombarded with a lot more information than we can process at once. We use our attentional abilities to filter out unwanted information and to focus on those things that appear particularly relevant—for example, right now I am trying to ignore all the buzz around me in a Star Alliance lounge at Heathrow […]
You may have heard that the United States had a presidential election last year. You may have also heard that the winner of that election was an outsider, a “straight-talker,” and an anti-establishment candidate. Enough material to fill the Library of Congress has been written on the content of what (first candidate, and now) President […]