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Put Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman together and you get Rain Man, the Academy-Award winning story of an autistic savant—played by Hoffman who received the Best Actor award for his performance—who turns out to have many unexpected talents. The clip below shows one famous scene, in which Hoffman knows within seconds that the waitress dropped […]
The #AS50 digital event concluded last week. The posts for this event coincided with the publication of a special issue of Memory & Cognition that celebrated the impact on cognitive science of a paper published by Richard C. Atkinson and Richard M. Shiffrin in 1967. The paper, given the hashtag #AS50 for our event, reported […]
Sarcasm, a type of irony, is inescapably embedded in the internet today, with ironic language of some kind being ubiquitous on Facebook, Twitter, in blogs, in news articles, and more. Computers, unlike people, often fail to detect sarcasm, which has the notable quality of often meaning nearly the opposite of what was written. For example, […]
When you think of creativity what do you imagine? There are a lot of examples to choose from, like cooking up a new take on a traditional dish, working with a team to reason through a difficult business problem, writing short stories, trouble-shooting an engineering problem that had everyone else stumped, or coming up with […]
Statistical graphs are so ubiquitous and part of our daily work that we may forget how powerful they are. Since their invention by William Playfair a little over 200 years ago, graphs have become indispensable tools not just in science and business, but also in politics. Indeed, one of Playfair’s contributions was to draw attention […]
Even beautiful minds take time to develop and mature. There is evidence that even an alleged child prodigy such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who started composing at age 5, required 10 years of practice to produce an outstanding piece of creativity. Alas, even beautiful minds will eventually turn from productivity to retirement, and no matter […]
Musical training encompasses a broad range of skills, which likely rely on a similarly large range of cognitive abilities. Consider the act of sight-reading, in which a musician plays from a piece of sheet music they have never seen before. The musician must read the upcoming notes (a feat of translating visual information into a […]
How many U.S. presidents can you name? (Apologies to our international audience.) Regardless of how many you can recall, I would bet that among the ones you did remember are Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Trump, Obama, and Bush. I would also bet that among the ones you did not remember are McKinley, Hoover, and Cleveland. Don’t […]
The annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society will commence a week from today. The Society is looking forward to welcoming you to New Orleans. The program has been posted and the mobile app is available for download. The Society is urging everyone who is planning to attend to register online rather than onsite. (My best guess is that you have […]
Have you ever had a conversation with someone who constantly averted their gaze? Why do you think that is? If you are like most people, you might suspect a myriad of reasons, with most being categorically not good. You might suspect that your conversational partner is socially uncomfortable, disinterested in the conversation, hiding something, or […]