About 15 years ago, I tried computer speech dictation for the first time. I had a paper to write, and I thought speaking to the computer would be much more efficient than typing. It was a complete disaster; what appeared in my word processor bore no resemblance to what I was saying. Luckily I was […]
Towards the end of last year, submissions from Psychonomics authors who expressed an interest in a post on their article began to outpace the ability of our team—that is me, Anna, Cassie, Gary, Melissa, and Steve—to keep up with reporting all of this interesting science to a broader audience. To deal with the growing backlog, the Psychonomic Society thankfully approved […]
What if your dad told you that you were capable of time travel? Well, what day goes by when we don’t imagine landing our dream job or snagging that grant? How many days go by that we don’t look fondly on that time we pretended to be incredibly sick and took our best friend’s car to […]
What is the connection between the spelling of a word and its meaning? Does the fact that the words “lead” (the metal) and “lead” (to go in front) are spelled the same somehow make them more similar in meaning than they would be if their spelling differed? A recent paper by Peleg and colleagues published in […]
We are born with the neural circuitry required to detect the emotion in facial expressions. By the age of 7 months, human infants clearly distinguish between faces that are angry and others that are happy or neutral. At the same age, effects of parenting are also beginning to emerge, with infants of parents who are particularly sensitive […]
A different sort of American Revolution took place in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The rift was again between the US and Britain, with those American upstarts once more insisting on going their own way. But this was a quiet revolution, so quiet that few people even noticed it. It was a revolution in how we […]
It is Christmas time and everything these days seems to be covered with singing Santas and stuffed stockings, shining brightly in red, white and green. Now imagine that sneaky red and white striped Waldo is hiding among the Christmas decorations. Telling him apart from the rest will be tedious. Needless to say, the similarity between […]
The tuxedo, the baton, the gestures – conducting an orchestra is, in part, about appearances. But beneath the facade, conductors have extraordinary cognitive abilities, which allow them to do their jobs. Conductors must maintain a constant tempo for a piece – which requires long term memory – and they must be able to listen to both […]
Did you find this link from Twitter, or from your email? And if you found this link on Twitter, are you returning to it periodically in case you feel like quipping about the content? Do you text others pictures of cats while you read those same articles? We are constantly dealing with attention capture (potentially from […]
In his influential book, Understanding the New Statistics, Geoff Cumming makes the case that psychologists should change the way they report their statistics. Psychologists, he argues, would be far better off if they stopped reporting p-values and started reporting confidence intervals. When I read his book I was struck by the information presented about p-value misconceptions based on a survey in […]