A few days ago I saw this video of Cycle Ball and thought what thousands of others thought, “how is this possible?!” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yEaZDGJt-c] The answer is, as the old joke goes, “Practice!” But practice what? I have been biking regularly for far longer than many of the players in the video and I am no closer […]
Signing a Swedish sound beats catching a ball: linguistic processing in sign language and working memory performance Imagine that you are discussing a familiar topic with a friend in a quiet room. If you are a neurotypical individual, understanding them and knowing what to say next may seem effortless. Now imagine that you are having […]
When you were a famous rock star: reading emotional facial expression during autobiographical recall
We all remember what it was like to be young, when we were rock stars, Blues singers, invincible volleyball players, or marathon runners. We may also remember that specific marathon on a Tuesday in November where some particularly clever person put a billboard next to the finish line that said “turning back now would be […]
We often think about conceptual thought as being uniquely human, however, there is growing evidence to suggest that animals can learn concepts as well. The use of concepts requires understanding the relationship between stimuli. So, if I presented these three faces to you and asked you who was familiar, my guess if that you’d choose […]
Eating dinner without checking your email: impulse control, time preference, and mobile device usage
How well would you do in the phone stacking game? In case you have not heard of it, it’s played during a dinner out and it goes as follows: at the beginning of the meal everyone puts their phone on a pile in the middle of the table. Like this: And then you start ordering drinks […]
When we teach our first-year Psychology students about the “history of Psychology”, they usually get to see at least one slide that shows a “black box”. “This black box” – we tend to say – “is what Behaviorists like Watson and Skinner wanted to keep unopened, since all they were interested in was the relationship […]
There are no statistics that inflame the passions of statisticians and scientists as does the p value. The p value is, informally, a statistic used for assessing whether a “null hypothesis” (e.g., that the difference in performance between two conditions is 0) should be taken seriously. It is simultaneously the most used and most hated statistic in all of […]
You are looking at a display of 17 green blobs and one red blob. Your task is to find the red blob and press a key as soon as you have found it. What could be simpler than this visual search task? Its apparent simplicity notwithstanding, this task has opened a fascinating and sometimes complex window […]
Since the enlightenment, openness has been a core part of the ethos of science. Scientific openness takes many forms: from its inception the Royal Society, for instance, published reports from all over the world, not just Great Britain. Science is politically open, a collective search for truth and human well-being ideally not concerned with national […]
Dictators are dictators but they are not all equally dictatorial—at least in the laboratory, when participants are given an amount of money to allocate between themselves and a recipient. In the classic dictator game, recipients are powerless and have to settle for whatever amount the “dictator” allocates to them. In sharp contrast to the expectations of […]