Clik here to view.
Shooting unarmed suspects: A matter of race?
[Originally posted in November 2006] The recent controversial shooting of an unarmed black man in New York has generated terrible grief and perhaps justifiable anger. But if officers honestly believed...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Angry faces attract our attention when other faces do not
We’ve discussed attentional blink several times on CogDaily. It’s a fascinating phenomenon: if you see a series of images flashing by rapidly, you can normally pick out one of the images (for example,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Pip and Pop Effect: Sound helps us find visual changes
Take a look at the following picture: Your job is to look for the one line that’s either perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical. It took me about 25 seconds to find it. Can you do better? How about...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beyond change blindness: Change deafness works almost the same way
We’ve talked a lot on Cognitive Daily about change blindness: the inability to spot visual differences between images and even real people and objects right before our eyes. The most dramatic...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How do we find those lost keys? The color of the environment doesn’t seem to...
The other day, our car wouldn’t start and Jim had to ask a neighbor over to help him jump-start it. There was much rushing in and out of the house looking for flashlights and other tools to help get...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Watch that hybrid! Can sound help us spot objects?
Recently we took our hybrid car into the shop for its annual emissions test. In our state, the test is conducted while the car is idling. A hybrid doesn’t actually idle — it shuts the engine off...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Product placements in movies: When they work, and when they don’t
Product placements in movies and TV shows are becoming so commonplace that my kids now cynically take note of them whenever they appear. It wasn’t always that way. In 1982 when I first saw E.T. I had...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What’s the best way to take a study break?
Greta and I did our undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, or as a commonly-sold T-shirt on campus put it, “where fun goes to die.” To say that Chicago didn’t emphasize academics over a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What if you saw something that rocked your world … and you didn’t notice?
If you’re a regular reader of Cognitive Daily, you’re relatively accustomed to seeing surprising things. Indeed, it’s gotten to the point where you might even expect it. You’ve seen optical illusions...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Emotional words distract, but only when you’re searching for meaning
I attended an unusual middle school. It was designed on an “open concept,” with the idea that there should be no walls between classrooms. Social pressure would keep the noise levels down, because if...
View Article
