Mechanisms of Attentional Control: A Special Issue in Honor of the Contributions of Steven Yantis
Steve Yantis was a leading researcher in attention and cognitive neuroscience who passed away two years ago. A special issue of the Psychonomic Society ’s journal Attention, Perception,& Psychophysics appeared this week in honor of his contributions to the field. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - September 8, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Contextualizing plastic to keep the coyotes away: What's in your tummy's memory?
Imagine you develop tummy troubles after visiting a local restaurant. Do you avoid the escargot that you think made you sick or do you stay away from the restaurant altogether? Recent research on animals reveals that conditioned taste aversion involves conditioning of the context in which the food was acquired as well. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - September 7, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
When marine mammals beat the WNBA: Welcome to Heather Hill
Heather Hill has joined the team of Digital Associate Editors. Heather his an expert in animal cognition, with a particular emphasis on marine mammals. Her first post will run tomorrow. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - September 6, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
"My brain made me do it": Reading our free will(usion)
Do we have a free will? At first glance given our sense of self this seems hard to deny. However, there is some evidence to suggest that our conscious experience of "will" is a result of neural decision-making processes, not a cause of them. Recent research provides a novel way to observe our free will (or is it a "willusion"?) in action inside the brain. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - September 1, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
The socially protected sex after traumatic brain injury
Traumatic brain injury affects 1.7 million people in the U.S. every year. The consequences of a brain injury can affect all aspects of a patient ’s life. One type of fallout often observed with brain injury is a social impairment arising from an inability to recognize facial affect. Recent research shows that this impairment is attenuated for female patients, even though they are equally impaired as males on other tests. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 26, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Creating rectangles on the fly: Attentional set and object-based effects
There are two main metaphors for visual attention: One metaphor holds that attention is a "spotlight" that focuses on a particular spatial location irrespective of its content. Another metaphor holds that attention is "object-based," and therefore spreads preferentially within an object rather than between objects, irrespective of location. Recent research has examined the boundary conditions of object-based attention. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 23, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Stand up comedy: bipedalism may be a laughing matter
Humans are a comedic species, at least some of the time. But laughter is not just a matter of jokes and humor: Recent research shows that it offers a window into cognition and language. Perhaps neither would have emerged without bipedalism. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 18, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
The cognitive snare of Mona Lisa's stare
Does Mona Lisa's gaze really follow you? And if so, does it matter? Recent research suggests that being stared at disrupts some cognitive processing. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 16, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Old Faithful but not El Capitan: multiple-choice pretesting helps learning about cronartium ribicola
Instructors often pretest their students at the beginning of a lecture on material that is about to be presented. The effects of such pretesting are often beneficial for subsequent learning. Recent research shows that this benefit extends to related information if pretesting is by multiple-choice items. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 11, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
When a beach bag turns into a memory hole for your sweater
Suppose you are packing a suitcase for the beach. How does searching for your bathing suit influence your memory? Is it easier to remember the items that you packed for your beach trip than the sweater you decided to put back in the closet? Recent research shows that items left behind may suffer a memory decrement. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 10, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
From A to... cognitive science: Welcome to Anja Jamrozik
Anja Jamrozik has has joined the team of Digital Associate Editors. She is already known to readers from the #symbodiment digital event, and her first post as Associate Editor will run tomorrow. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 9, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Generating the angular velocities of planetary and annular gears: When self-generating explanations helps learning
Can you explain how a car differential works? If not, then to learn how differentials work you may want to generate an explanation from a picture and a description. Self-generating explanations is known to boost people's learning. Recent research has identified the particular constraints when this self-generation advantage holds. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 3, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
When more information leads to greater willingness to sacrifice: moral dilemmas and utilitarian accessibility
Can killing ever be justified? What if sacrificing one life can save several others? This debate at the heart of philosophy and ethics is frequently informed by what people actually do when confronted with moral dilemmas. Recent research shows that when people are given complete information about the consequences of their actions, they are more likely to choose to sacrifice one life to save several others. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - July 28, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
What are you looking at, cockatoo? Does social learning depend on social relationships?
Just like us, non-human animals are good at learning from each other and are able to gather different sorts of information. This ability can be very sophisticated, such as learning about complex motor patterns, or it can be something simpler, such as when the presence of another animal interacting with an object makes you more attracted to that object later. Recent research examines whether the social hierarchy among cockatoos determines how much social learning takes place. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - July 26, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Keeping Andromeda peripheral: tracking multiple targets out of the corner of your eye
We owe most of our visual acuity to our fovea, the area of the retina that is most densely packed with photo-receptive cones. But it does not follow that peripheral vision is the poor cousin of the fovea: Quite on the contrary, there are situations in which peripheral vision can get the job done whereas the fovea fails. Recent research examines how multiple moving targets can be tracked peripherally. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - July 21, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
