We are all part of a culture: certain behaviors and practices are deeply ingrained in our society and, by implication, in all of us. For example, one strongly normative behavior in the United Kingdom is to queue politely for the bus or the checkout in the supermarket. (Apparently this norm is so strong that disproportionately […]
Video games have gotten a bad rap. When googling “do video games”, the first results Google suggests are “rot your brain”, “make you dumber”, and then finally “make you smarter.” As far as the last option is concerned, evidence seems to be accumulating that shows that gaming does enhance visual processing and cognitive control skills. […]
One of the essential goals of psychology is generalization: describing ways in which people are similar. Of course, human behaviour varies across situations, times, and individuals, and hence often defies generalization. Ignoring this variability and assuming that people are the same can lead to improper generalizations about human behaviour. In a new paper in the Psychonomic Bulletin […]
I sometimes use MTurk for running experiments. As an old-timer, there is something of a magical quality to MTurk. You post your study and only a few hours later you receive data from perhaps one thousand or so people. I can remember when we used to meet the people participating in our studies face-to-face, with […]
Data is everywhere. Political campaigns, sports teams, and even music streaming sites rely on the collection and analysis of data to win, or to attain customers, and to sell targeted advertisements. Journalists use data to report the news and the public interprets data in consuming that news. Becoming data literate is no longer just a requirement of the scientist or the […]
How are the meanings of words, events and objects represented and organized in the brain? When we think of a dog, what representation are we invoking? Is there such thing as an abstract dogness—the doggiest of all dogs—or do we merely remember one of many stored exemplars of dogs that we have encountered in our lives? (If […]
Eye movements offer unique insight into the functioning of the human mind. We have discussed eye movements on this blog repeatedly. For example, we have learned that while listening to music people move their eyes in a manner that is suggestive of attention being focused inward. Eye movements can also reveal whether or not people are distracted […]
Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know what it meant to go berserk. Or, more accurately, I didn’t know what it really meant to go berserk. I was used to examples like this (thanks, COCA!): “My God. It’s like the Richmond Botanical Gardens gone berserk. I’ve never seen plants this big.” “Annie hadn’t given him a goodbye today, […]
The #symbodiment special issue of the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review empaneling “Arguments about the nature of concepts” embodies much that is salutary about our field—vigorous, sometimes heated, criticism of recent creative attempts to ground cognition. How symbols are grounded to their worldly referents has long been recognized as a central problem for psychology by scholars such as Harnad and Skinner. The […]
How are the meanings of words, events, and objects represented and organized in the brain? This question, perhaps more than any other in the field, probes some of the deepest and most foundational puzzles regarding the structure of the mind and brain. …so begins Mahon and Hickok’s introduction to this collection of papers “on issues of fundamental significance to […]