Unfortunately for me, one of the first things I see most mornings is an ad. It’s largely my fault—I have the extremely terrible habit of keeping my phone next to me at night and then an arguably worse habit of checking Twitter (excuse me, X) in the morning, leading me to inevitably scroll past an […]
You may not get a second chance to make a first impression, but how important are first impressions really? According to the authors of an article recently published in the Psychonomic Society’s journal Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, “Human beings live in a social environment that functions through the establishment of hierarchies, with individuals acting as […]
How am I supposed to learn my way around this confusing new place? Picture the following situation: you’re on vacation, you’ve spent all day (and then some) in airports and on planes, and you’ve finally made it to your hotel. Now you’ve got to find your room, and you need to remember how to get […]
Is this the right assessment for you? Is it right for me? Imagine you’re back in school (it may have been a while for you!) and you’re undergoing some kind of psychometric assessment, perhaps to see if you need extra support to be the best student you can be. If you’re reading this, it’s probably […]
In this episode of All Things Cognition, I interviewed Zoe Hughes (pictured below) about her meta-analysis published in the Psychonomic Society journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review on the effects of mindfulness on creativity with co-authors, Linden Ball, Jeannie Judge, and Cassandra Richardson. We talked about different types of creativity and which was more impacted by […]
Many of us have things that we look forward to when the weather gets cooler – the usual apple picking, pumpkin carving, admiring the fall leaves, and (how could I forget) the Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting. One thing that I don’t particularly look forward to is the dense fog that happens around this time of […]
Have you ever noticed that restaurants often advertise their food with vibrant, bright colors—highlighting every juicy morsel of the meal? The reasoning is simple: colorful photography makes the food more appetizing and makes us (the viewer) more likely to buy it. Some believe that this type of advertising even contributes to overeating habits when marketing […]
When was the last time you learned something without even trying? If your answer was “never”, you might be surprised to find out that much of what we learn in our day-to-day lives comes to us fairly effortlessly. This is because we’re remarkably good at picking up on patterns in our environment. From a young […]
Learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum, so why do our recommendations for “strategic learning” ignore context? When we think about investigating learning – what it is and what processes are involved – we might think about it in ways similar to how Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) proposed in their model of human memory: Maybe you […]
The communication of scientific findings to the broader public is a noble, but often fraught goal. Scientific progress comes in fits and spurts, with meanings rarely understandable in the moment they occur. As a result of this uncertainty, it is often difficult to know how to place a single study or even a series of […]