Jules Verne, considered a Father of Science Fiction, pioneered the idea of space travel, along with air and water travel, long before the advent of rocket ships and space shuttles, airplanes, and submarines. Ray Bradbury wrote about electronic devices considered prototypes for Bluetooth and Airpods in Farenheit 451. Neuromancer by William Gibson brings to life […]
How well do you remember detailed visual information, such as the precise color or shape of an object you saw several hours ago? Although intuition might suggest that our memory for fine details is quite poor, research finds that visual long-term memory has a massive capacity for visual details of objects and scenes. For instance, after […]
There are absolutely no swear words in Toy Story 3. This is something that probably should go without saying, if you’re even vaguely familiar with the Disney/Pixar approach to family entertainment. And yet, as I paused in my scrolling through a popular short video app, this was exactly the thought that skipped through my mind […]
Picture this. After a long and effortful process of gathering data for your latest experiment, you sit down in front of the computer, coffee in hand, ready to analyze the results. Before you dive into interpreting your analyses and seeing whether your predictions came to fruition, you decide to check the assumptions for your statistical […]
Picture yourself sitting in front of a seemingly endless stack of exams to grade, full of open-ended questions, with responses demonstrating varying levels of understanding. Now imagine your joy when you flip open an exam with a first response that just gets it. An exceptional answer that demonstrates a true mastery of the material. Did […]
Have you ever seen someone who, after being wronged, seems more concerned about a way to get revenge than in stopping to think about what happened and whether revenge is even worth it? Reacting to aggressions without thinking can lead to bad consequences, ranging from relatively mild, such as a heated discussion where impoliteness escalates […]
In this episode of All Things Cognition, I interviewed Michelle Rivers and Steven Pan (pictured below) about their recent Psychonomic Society journal Memory & Cognition paper called “Metacognitive Awareness of the Pretesting Effect Improves with Self-Regulation Support.” In addition to talking about the benefits of pretesting (or prequestions) on learning, we also talked about other effective […]
Are your decisions tied to your gender? Prior research has shown gender differences in financial and career-related decisions, like choosing what to invest in or entrepreneurship. Research has suggested that this may be related to the greater risk sensitivity in women compared to men. But is this true in all situations? “Do men and women […]
A few paces into a walk one day, my friend’s dog found, nestled under a pile of autumn leaves, the most wonderful treasure the world could offer: a discarded box of half-eaten chicken wings. Before my friend could pull her dog away, the wings were gone—inhaled with the speed of an opportunist who knows better […]
Which of these is more common in the English language: A) words that end in “ing” B) words with “n” as the second to last letter? It might be tempting to pick A. There are lots of verbs that come easily to mind that end in “ing” (racing, baking, typing, etc.)—not to mention nouns like […]