Getting the most out of a cat’s paw: Wind detection among expert sailors

Who is an expert? Someone once suggested it’s “anyone who is more than 50 miles from home and is carrying a briefcase” or “someone who continually learns more and more about less and less”. The more somber but widely agreed definition in the cognitive community invokes reproducible superior performance in a particular domain. That is, an expert […]

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New Service: Online Studies for Members

As part of the Psychonomic Society’s efforts to upscale its digital presence, we are introducing a new service by enabling members to post links to online experiments on the Society’s webpage. The new facility will be given its own page, Online Studies for Members, and the guidelines governing the use of this page are as follows: […]

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When red is so red you don’t mind the blue: Attention as your guard against interference

Suppose you are asked to name a few pictures. You are shown the drawing of a tiger and you say “tiger”. Then a mouse appears and you say “mouse”, and so on. The experimenter avoids pictures of a gerenuk or babirusa, so you are cruising along nicely. And then this pops up:   The holiday is […]

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Letter from America – via Edinburgh: Words from the Chair of the Governing Board

I was a fan of Alistair Cooke’s ‘Letter from America’ presented on BBC Radio 4 until shortly before he died in 2004. As a USA-based British journalist he provided major insights for Radio 4 listeners over nearly six decades of political and cultural life in North America. Rarely did he touch on science but he […]

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News from the Cocktail Circuit: Extracting useful information from the din

You are deeply involved in a conversation with someone at a party when suddenly you hear someone say your name, and, before you even know what happened, your attention is transported toward the voice that uttered it. This is an example of the cocktail party effect, first described in 1959 and recently extended even to visual stimuli. This […]

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If it’s not moving it’ll hit you: Perceptual biases in 3D motion detection

Much of civil aviation ultimately relies on the human perceptual system: Pilots must avoid each other by scanning the airspace around them and identifying aircraft that are in potential conflict. This is a skill that can be taught—and during the 15 years that I spent teaching people how to fly, there were a few basic ideas […]

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What’s your point? Sea lions can use human gestural cues

If you see someone point to something over your head you generally look upwards. This is because humans understand that this type of referential communication is used to draw our attention to an object or place that the informer is attending to (we are extremely susceptible to this – the direction of human attention can even […]

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Feeling the bear behind the trees: How our sense of touch fills in the blanks

The parable of the Blind men and an elephant, a group of blind men (or blindfolded people or people in complete darkness) touch an elephant to learn what it is they are facing. Each person feels a single part such as a leg or the trunk or a tusk. The “blind men” then compare notes and […]

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