… The pandemic has not been a single, traumatic “flashbulb” event like the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the fiery disintegration of the space shuttle Challenger, or 9/11. Instead, it’s a life period in which everybody’s memories will be embedded, more like the Great Depression or World War II, or More
Our minds can automatically create well-defined representations of objects that are merely implied rather than seen, like the obstacles in a mime’s performance More
In the late 1860s, Charles Darwin proposed that being grossed out could have an evolutionary purpose. Disgust, he wrote, was inborn and involuntary, and it evolved to prevent our ancestors from eating spoiled food that might kill them. Darwin hypothesized that the early humans most prone to revulsion survived to pass on More
… What researchers can say about our decision making process with some degree of certainty is that it can be negatively impacted by stress, especially when sustained over prolonged periods. “Stress decreases our working memory capacity, so we have fewer cognitive resources to wrap our heads around all the different More
… It turns out that many aspects of our pandemic lives could lead to impaired executive functioning, which is a fancy way of describing the mental processes that allow us to plan, organize and remember instructions. “A lot of things need to function well for our memory to work ideally,” said More
APS Member/Author: Alison Gopnik What do the haves owe to the have-nots? Should a society redistribute resources from some people to others? These questions are central to the economic policy differences between left and right. The opposing views might seem completely irreconcilable. But a new paper in the journal Cognition More
