-
Cheating the Lie Detector
In its war on terror, the U.S. government uses handheld lie detectors for fast screening of terrorism suspects. It has been shown that the pocket polygraphs have high error rates and are susceptible to successful
-
Will That Be on the Test?
Toward the end of the 19th century, the German scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus concocted an experiment that countless children have unwittingly replicated ever since, over a morning bowl of Alpha-Bits. Ebbinghaus took consonants from the alphabet
-
The New SAT: A Work in Progress
It used to be that an acceptance letter from a good college was simply a pleasant prelude to the game of life. No more. In 21st century America, getting into the best universities has become
-
Un-total Recall: Amnesics Remember Grammar, but Not Meaning of New Sentences
Syntactic persistence is the tendency for speakers to produce sentences using similar grammatical patterns and rules of language as those they have used before. Although the way this occurs is not well understood, previous research
-
Eureka! How Distractions Facilitate Creative Problem Solving
How many times have you spent hours slaving over an impossible problem, only to take a break and then easily solve the problem, sometimes within minutes of looking at it again? This is actually a
-
The Science of Cramming
I went to a very nerdy college. This school was so nerdy that the “mascot” was an engineer, and at football games students would chant: “Tangent, secant, cosine, sine. Three point one four one five
