The Culture of Crows: Leveraging leaves or learning locations?
Cultural traditions are common in humans and are thought to be rooted in our evolutionary history. But culture is not a uniquely human trait and cultural traditions have been observed in other species, for example wild apes. Recent research has examined the culture of New Caledonian crows. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - September 3, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Drawing the curtains of the windows into the soul
Poets have thought of eyes as being windows into the soul for centuries. Contemporary cognitive scientists use eyes to reveal the inner workings of the mind, either by tracking their movement during a task or by examining the extent to which the pupil dilates. Recent research relates pupil dilation to the judged "salience" of sounds. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 31, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
New York is to the left of Buenos Aires but only when your street cafe faces east: Mental representation underlying navigation
We all know how to navigate through our city of residence and people are remarkably accurate at constructing a map of landmarks. But which way is the map pointing? Is north always up? Recent research highlights the flexibility of mental representations and our ability to re-align them to make navigation more convenient. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 28, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Oh! What fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh: The cognitive jingles of earworms
We have all experienced it: a song or jingle spontaneously pops into our mind and will "play itself" over and over again. How accurate are the mental representations of those unbidden spontaneous "earworms"? Recent research suggests that earworms are represented with considerable accuracy that differs little from the accuracy of voluntary and deliberate attempts of recall. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 25, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
One year of precocious baboons: More sparkling Pleiades wanted
It has been (almost) a year since we started the Featured Content section. Time to sum up and say thanks to the team. Sadly, it is also time to say farewell to one of our Digital Associate Editors. The good news is that we now have a vacancy for a Digital Associate Editor--please help us fill it. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 18, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Call of Duty or Tetris? The cognitive payoff of some video games
Video games both challenge and entertain us. We play them for fun, and the more we play the better we get. But might the skills we develop while gaming transfer to other activities? Recent research highlights that some video games may lead to the transfer of some cognitive skills (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 17, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Primate maths: Precocious baby baboons beating your own baby
Quantity matters when we are making decisions about all aspects of our life. If something costs the same but we have the choice to have more or less of it, have you ever deliberately chosen less? Recent research shows that quantitative judgments can also be made by infant baboons, and sometimes earlier in development than in young humans. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 13, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Pamela Anderson or Britney Spears? Experiencing your birth matters
What does Beyoncé have in common with Pamela Anderson, but not with Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie? And what is it that Britney and Angelina have in common? Apparently, Britney and Angelina gave birth to their babies by caesarian section whereas Beyoncé and Pamela gave birth naturally. Recent research suggests that knowing how someone has come into this world may tell us something about their early cognitive behavior. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 9, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Test link generation
to be ignored (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 6, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
4,000 years of the pursuit of happiness: overcoming the dark side of hedonism and reward
When a behavior is rewarded, it becomes more frequent. Rewards also help people focus their attention on particular aspects of a task. And of course, being rewarded is by definition pleasurable. However, previous research has also identified a dark side to being rewarded: Once a behavior has been rewarded, it persists even when it is no longer optimal. A recent article shows how this can be overcome. You just have to reward people even more. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - August 5, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
From Null to Bayes: Making implicit learning more explicit
When participants acquire new knowledge but lack conscious knowledge of the rules of the task, learning is claimed to be implicit. Implicit learning is arguably one of the most famous and most widely accepted null results; that is, it rests on the presumed absence of conscious knowledge. Null results are inherently problematic for conventional statistics: A recent meta analysis based on modern Bayesian statistics comes to intriguing conclusions. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - July 30, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Waking sleeping numbers with your hot hand: People's perceptions of randomness
Randomness and human cognition generally do not mesh well. People perceive all sorts of things in a sequence that is actually random, and our perceptions can be contradictory: On the one hand, gamblers think that a red number is "due" after 10 black numbers have come up at roulette. On the other hand, we think that a basketball player has a "hot hand" if they make 3 shots in a row. Recent research illuminates the features of randomness that determine those perceptions. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - July 28, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Surviving the Hajj and Escaping from an Empty Palace: Agents and Games to the Rescue
How do people explore spaces they don't know? How do crowds flow through physical space? Recent research examines people's indoor navigation skills by creating an interactive video game, and by modeling people's behavior by simple computational agents. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - July 21, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
When the cat barks and the guitar has a bow: Neurocognitive signatures of processing perplexing text
Whenever we process text, we seek to construct an integrated, coherent, and accurate mental representation of the state of affairs described by the text. To do so, we often need to go beyond the literal text in front of us and generate inferences about what might be happening next. When those expectations are violated, we need to revise our understanding. Recent research sheds light on those processes and their neural signature. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - July 17, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
Building knowledge requires bricks, not sand
Recent research points to the importance of the meaning of the stimuli involved in constructing new knowledge. People are better able to learn to associate objects when the constituent entities are highly familiar or meaningful. (Source: Psychonomic Society News)
Source: Psychonomic Society News - July 13, 2015 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news
