Here’s a challenge. While you read this post, I want you to stay completely focused. Don’t let your attention drift – no checking emails, thinking about your lunch plans, or petting your dog. Sounds easy enough, right? Sometimes, it’s hard to pay attention. Sometimes the task is too difficult, sometimes other things distract you, or […]
There are some memories you wish you could forget. I wish I could forget the time in high school when, during the finals of a debate tournament, I accidentally spent an entire speech in front of an auditorium packed with people making arguments in favor of the opposing team’s side. While the loss of this […]
As mentioned in the last post, the Psychonomic Society launched a new program, a Science Communication internship for graduate students to gain experience writing about scientific findings for the general public. Two interns, Kelly Cotton and Raunak Pillai (Raunak’s interview is here), were selected for the first term that will last over the next six months. During this time, […]
The Psychonomic Society launched a new program, a Science Communication internship. Not all graduate students wish to continue in academia, so this program offers experience writing about science for the general public. Even for those students who do wish to go down the academic path, communicating our research to other people than other scientists is […]
As you try to make sense of this sentence, do you find yourself looking at individual letters, or processing each word automatically? If you are an expert English reader, you probably said the latter. Evidence suggests that at least some word recognition occurs due to holistic processing, or perceptually integrating letters into a unitary whole. […]
According to Google, there are approximately 2.2 billion mothers in the world. On average, a woman of reproductive age is likely to have 2.5 children across her lifetime. According to ourworldindata.org, the global fertility rate varies substantially across countries as seen in the graphic below. Mothers, Madres, Mamas Women account for 49.5% of our world’s […]
Whenever I visit a new city, one of my favorite things to do is go to the local natural history museum. I love seeing every color of the rainbow expressed in our earth’s gems and minerals, walking among the models of whale and dinosaur skeletons, and feeling humbled by the vastness of our universe. As […]
Ah, the power of swear words. Whether you curse like a sailor or never use foul language, we all know a swear word when we hear it. They have a special ability to convey one’s emotion with particular emphasis—whether grief, pain, anger, fear, desire, joy, or surprise. Sometimes, the most reasonable emotional reaction is a […]
One of my favorite parts in the development of a good friendship is the moment you realize that you’ve started to mimic each other. Take, for instance, the ridiculous way my high school friends and I started to mispronounce word “beverage” with an extra r: breverage. This didn’t stem from any speech difficulties or our […]
November is here. The leaves changed from green into vibrant yellows, oranges, and reds and carpeted the streets. The air chilled, so my winter clothes reappeared, replacing my summer clothes, as I braced myself for the colder months ahead. Root vegetables supplanted fresh salads on my menus. For me, an American in the UK, November […]