Description: Ok, here is a challenging question. Imagine you are a parent, and your child is 4 years old, and you need some butter for a recipe you are working on for a large family dinner, but you have several things in the oven and on the stove and you cannot leave (Covid inspired delivery… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Learning
Admitting Uncertainty and Trust are Related: Ask a 4-year-old!
Description: Regardless of what you thought of the events surrounding the so-called Freedom Convoy in Canada’s capital of Ottawa over the past 3 weeks it was very clear that there are quite a few people who do not trust that the government is giving them the right information and advice or doing the right thing… Read more »
Would Addiction be More Treatable if it Was Not a Crime?
Description: Think about how you would answer this question. Why do we arrest people found in possession of personal use amounts of addictive drugs and often send them to jail? Is it because we think that the threat of arrest will be a deterrent to becoming addicted? How is that working out for us? What… Read more »
Psychological Drivers of Misinformation Belief: A Not So New But Critical Topic
Description: Given our direct and media shared experiences surrounding recent events such as the COVID pandemic, American elections and related capital events, climate change and much else you cannot be unaware of the phenomenon of misinformation and related beliefs. You may be aware of concerns over social media “echo chambers” that become sole sources for… Read more »
(Ir)rational Thinking and How (Not) to Do It
Description: I am willing to bet that you think of yourself as a reasonable, rational, thoughtful person and that you do feel that you get emotionally caught up in situations and circumstances in ways that might negatively impact your ability to make rational decisions. It IS true that people (adults in particular) CAN be quite… Read more »
Think Your Way to New Habits? Just stop it!
Description: Yah yah, I know, it is New Year’s and we all have to make some resolutions, we all have to beat ourselves up about some of the things we regularly do that we should not do and we need to decide we are not going to do them any-more. How does that usually work… Read more »
A Neural Mechanism of Advanced Cognition
Description: Research into what happens in your brain when you try and memorize a new fact or procedure has traditionally focused upon the activity or the firing of individual neurons. One event that has been hard to explain using single neuron theories involves what happens when you teach someone a strategy or a mnemonic for… Read more »
How are Tool Use and Speech Processing Related?
Description: Ok here is a question. What do tool use and spoken language syntax have in common? No idea? I do not blame you. What if I provided you with a hint (a bit of data) suggesting that the two are correlated AND that training in one of them (tool use OR processing complex spoken… Read more »
Anxiety = Uncertainty + Fear, Unwind it.
Description: I was teaching a summer course called Psychology for Everyday Life last summer in a dual credit format which meant that it was a real university course, but it was being taken by 150 senior high school students who would receive credit for the university course as well as receive a number of senior… Read more »
Child Minds vs Adult Minds: One Species or Two?
Description: Here is a scientific creativity problem for you. What might it mean to say that, in terms of how their minds are organized and how they engage with the world, that human adults and human small children are basically different species? Puzzle on that for a little bit, drawing upon what you know or… Read more »
Books for Success!
