We are social beings. As much as we admire the “rugged individualist”, from the Lone Ranger to Crocodile Dundee, in reality most of us are sensitive to the behavior of others around us. We conform to “social norms” on a myriad of occasions: when queueing for the bus, when participating in recycling because our neighbors do, when we do […]
It was once thought that what we perceive is a straightforward reflection of a stable reality. So, we see a circle to be a certain size because it is a certain size. A quick glance at illusions such as the Ebbinghaus illusion and the Rubik’s cube color illusion clearly show that this is not the case: what we perceive […]
A picture is worth a thousand words—or is it? How does a pulley work? What about a block and tackle? According to Wikipedia, “A pulley is a wheel on an axle that is designed to support movement and change of direction of a cable or belt along its circumference.” When multiple pulleys are combined together “so […]
In 2005 Amazon launched the Mechanical Turk platform (MTurk), a marketplace where requesters can pay “workers” from all over the world to complete tasks over the internet. MTurk is used to crowdsource many tasks that are still best completed by aggregate human intelligence (as opposed to machine intelligence), such as rating the relevance of search […]
When we read stories, we are transported into magical worlds. That magical world may be another person’s life, a point in the distant past, or it may be a world full of magic and wizardry. One of the most remarkable things we do when we read is to imagine things we cannot ever see or […]
We all want more power. Statistical power, that is, to detect an effect in the presence of noise even if it is small. But is this always true? Power seems to be something we should all strive for, just like replicability. The reality is however a bit more nuanced: A few weeks ago I wrote about the […]
Where is the cheese? Within-compound spatial learning in rats Spatial cognition is crucial for our survival as it allows us to remember where to find food, water and shelter. But, with a vast amount of information surrounding us, which of the many cues do we actually use when trying to reach a goal? And how […]
Cristiano Ronaldo (Real Madrid) is currently soccer’s best penalty kicker in La Liga with 35 goals in 37 penalties, which translates to a stunning 94.6% success rate. But really, how hard can it be? With a goal standing eight feet high and eight yards wide just 12 yards away from these professional soccer players, how could one […]
There is physics. Then there is psychology. And never the twain shall meet? No, quite to the contrary: The nature of the relationship between the physical world and its psychological representation is among the most studied—and understood—of all mental phenomena. For more than 150 years, psychophysicists have been studying the mapping between physical quantities, such as weight […]
“Magic mirror in my hand, who is the fairest in the land?” Grimm and Grimm (1812) were among the first to note that mirrors do not always provide the perceiver with the desired or expected result. Two centuries later, our methodologies have become vastly more sophisticated but researchers are still fascinated by how people process information in […]