The annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society will go under way in roughly a week. The Society is looking forward to seeing you in Boston. The program has been available for some time, and there is also a mobile app. The Society is urging everyone who is planning to attend to register online rather than onsite. There […]
You are in the cognitive laboratory to participate in an experiment. A tight cluster of 300 lines at various orientations is projected onto the screen in front of you. Are they predominantly tilted to the left or to the right? The experimenter has instructed you to respond as quickly as possible by pressing one of […]
What color is Wednesday? If the answer is obvious to you, you might have a form of synesthesia in which sequences such as numbers, days of the week, and months of the year are perceived as having colors (or else you might be from Thailand). Initially, one may well be skeptical on being told that […]
26th of June 2006. Soccer World Cup. Italy-v-Australia is tied at 0-0 in the 95th minute. Fabio Grosso, Italy’s hero who ultimately secured the World Cup against France during a penalty shoot-out, dribbles his way into the penalty area and falls over an Australia defender. The referee awards a penalty to Italy, and the rest […]
One of the Psychonomic Society’s journals turned 50 this year: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, more often affectionately known as AP&P, has been contributing to the scientific literature for half a century. The publisher of the journal, Springer, produced a little “happy-birthday” video: The Editor’s birthday perspective To further explore this milestone, I interviewed the […]
Imagine your daily commute. Think about 2+2. Don’t picture pink elephants. These examples illustrate the automaticity of cognition. On highly familiar routes, people habitually and automatically navigate, sometimes taking a familiar route absent-mindedly even when they needed to run an errand some place else. I’d be willing to bet that most people reading this couldn’t […]
A philosopher and a theologian are discussing their respective fields over coffee. The theologian dismisses philosophy: “You know what a philosopher is like?” he demands. “A philosopher is a man searching in a dark room for a black cat that isn’t there.” The philosopher nods. “Maybe so,” he concedes, “but it takes a theologian to […]
Better get those headphones: We can’t really ignore task-related noise Like many people, I work in an open office. Workers increasingly find themselves in open offices as companies (and universities) switch to these layouts in a bid to maximize space and reduce building costs. In my case, I work remotely but share a local co-working […]
A flashback from 30 years ago in my house with my mother yelling for me from another room, but before she ever gets to me, it goes a little something like this: “Garry, . . .Alex, . . .Patty, . . . Fluffy, . . . HEATHER, . . .have you taken the garbage out?” […]
You are an intern in the premier hospital in Tierra del Fuego and you are seeing about 240 patients daily, who always suffer from one of two possible diseases (things are a little different in Tierra del Fuego), namely meowism or barkosis. The tricky thing is that the same symptoms are associated with both diseases, […]