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 […]
When looking at a tomato helps you touch a fire engine: Attentional processes cross effector boundaries Our attention guides our perception, memory, and action in intriguing ways. For example, some time ago on this blog we learned that visual search can be directed by conceptual information: Saying or reading a word such as “tomato” makes it […]
William James famously said that the world is “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” to an infant whose sensory apparatus is “assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once.” As adults, we are still assailed by all of the above, but somehow we manage to deal with the complexity of the world. We use […]
Those who can, do; those who can’t, play video games? Video games offer an alternative, simplified, gamified reality. Players can compete imbued with athletic prowess, military skills and tools, and superhuman abilities of all sorts, regardless of real world limitations. But some video games offer simulations that are remarkably life-like. Do players of those games benefit by […]
David Starr Jordan, the renowned ichthyologist and founding President of Stanford in 1891, was famous for his encyclopedic knowledge of fish. Names, classifications, habitats—everything was impeccably memorized and available for recall from the expert’s exquisite memory. Sadly, President Jordan proved unable to get to know the students at Stanford by name, as had been his […]
Most would agree that that taking an interdisciplinary approach to studying the mind and brain is a necessity. Yet, as practicing scientists we often find ourselves in decidedly disciplinary bubbles: reading specific journals, and relying on theoretical constructs and methods that we are most familiar with. In a new study published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, Kristin Wilson […]
As humans we use numbers in almost everything that we do. They are used to quantify, categorise and measure all aspects of everyday life. The same is true of animals: numbers could be useful to them to identify how many animals there are in a competing group, the amount of food available and so on. […]
“You guys know an awful lot that could really benefit the public”—this is the motto of Lasting Learning (http://www.lastinglearning.com/), a start-up company run by Cameron Broumand, a former real estate man whom I interviewed recently about his vision for how Psychonomic knowledge can feature in a commercial enterprise. Cameron’s story starts with his experience as a […]
Legend has it that in Texas, and perhaps other jurisdictions where the value of pi is determined by political vote, sharpshooters market their skills by first firing a shotgun at a barn door and then painting a bull’s eye around their preferred hole. There has been much concern recently that parts of science are not immune […]