Temple University psychologist Nora Newcombe has received a 2014 William James lifetime achievement award from APS, in honor of her role in advancing the field of cognitive science. Newcombe will deliver her award address, “Resolving the Nativist-Empiricist Debate: A Neoconstructivist Approach to Cognitive Development,” at the 26th APS Annual Convention More
The Colbert Report: Stephen: But now there’s a modern way to cram all the data into our sense holes, and it brings us to tonight’s Word: Head in the Cloud. Folks, to deal with information overload the human brain uses something called transactive memory, relying on friends and family to More
On the Strength of Connections Between Localist Mental Modules as a Source of Frequency-of-Occurrence Effects Derek Besner, Sarah Moroz, and Shannon O’Malley How do people become familiar with items and events that appear frequently in their lives? To test potential mechanisms, the reaction times to numerical stimuli presented in either More
The Toronto Star: Trying to get your crush to notice you? You may want to change your cellphone number. Frequent texting has so rewired our brains, says a recent German study, that when dialling numbers we unconsciously think of the words behind them. We even adopt the emotional feeling of More
A psychological scientist in Germany has found a way that cell phones, and specifically texting, have hacked into our brains. Just by typing the numbers that correspond to the letters in a word like “love,” we can activate the meaning of that word in our minds. The results are published More
The capacity to remember that a zebra has stripes, or that a giraffe is a four-legged mammal, is known as semantic memory. It allows us to assign meaning to words and to recall general knowledge and concepts that we have learned. The deterioration of these capacities is a defining feature of semantic More
