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General Science

Love math, but don’t care too much

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[A child playing with number toys on a table.]

As part of my job as a researcher and graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, I invite parents and children to play math games in our lab. As I lead parents and children through studies about how children learn, I’ve seen very different attitudes in parents towards math. Some parents would happily talk about numbers and inferences in their daily interactions, and they make a lot of attempts to start a conversation about math…

Demystifying Artificial Intelligence: A crash course in machine learning

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[An image of a human head; through the head are a series of orange wires forming a network reminiscent of the circuits on a computer chip.]

Artificial intelligence continues to make the news, especially with technologies like ChatGPT – an AI Chatbot – and DALL-E – an image-generating software – becoming increasingly accessible to the public. Reports of modified syllabi in colleges and universities and sentient chatbots may have piqued your interest recently, and for a good reason! AI has gradually become embedded in our daily lives as an influential tool for COVID-19 contact tracing, national security, healthcare, and much more…

#PrimatesAreNotPets: A social media animal welfare campaign

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[A capuchin monkey hanging from a branch high up in the tree.]

Have you ever seen “#PrimatesAreNotPets” floating around Twitter and other social media platforms? There’s a good reason this hashtag is becoming more prominent on the internet; primatologists, animal welfare activists, and conservationists are pushing to bring attention to the illegal pet trade and the devastation that it wrecks on the animals and their natural habitats. Primates aren’t the only exotic animals affected by the illegal pet trade, but they provide an excellent example of what removing a species from an ecosystem can do both at home and in the wild…

Switching it up: Using sneaker culture to teach chemistry to PEERs

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[Jakyra Simpson Posing with Sneakers and Chemistry Props.]

When you look at the statistics of the amount of underrepresented, underserved, and marginalized students pursuing Chemistry degrees. As it’s been said, “The Math ain’t Mathin’,” and there is, therefore, a need to incorporate new teaching styles (pedagogies) that are inclusive and culturally relevant…

Back to the Stone Age: Monkey see monkey do

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[A monkey looking into a mirror.]

Primate archaeology is a fast growing field. While archaeology usually refers to the study of the human past through the excavation of past tools, remains, and civilizations, primate archaeology unearths the technological (tool use) past of our primate relatives as well as observes tool use by primates in real time. Each year, scientists make new discoveries about primates and their behaviors that prompt questions about the full extent of our primate relatives’ cognition and how it relates back to our own cognitive evolution…

How computer science aids psychology: Cognitive modeling of natural objects

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[A cartoon drawing of a brain with the left hemisphere depicted with brain tissues and the right hemisphere a circuit board with cogs and gears.]

Could you imagine that a computer program can infer the nutritional content of some food item from reading articles on related topics? How about an algorithm that can give medical diagnoses based on radiological images? Although these abilities sound like science fiction, they are becoming closer to reality thanks to the recent integration of computer science and cognitive science…

People get “brain drain” when smartphones merely exist in room

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[A person typing on the laptop with one hand while tapping the smartphone with the other hand.]

Have you – at least for a moment – ever imagined throwing your smartphone out the window, especially when you are trying to focus on your work? Now you might have a justification for your impulse. Behavioral scientists recently found that if your smartphone is merely present in your room, and even if you are not consciously thinking of it, you may still be distracted…

The cognitive process behind categorizing objects

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[Schematic drawings of various everyday objects embedded in a person’s brain. A question mark is drawn to indicate the question of categorization.]

Conscious or not, we are faced with countless categorization decisions during our everyday lives. When organizing kids’ rooms, parents need to decide if various items are tools or toys, to know in which drawer to place them… No matter how fast and intuitive some categorizations may feel, the process of making any classification decision involves a chain of cognitive steps…

How cultures shape emotions

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[A collage of schematic drawings embedded in human heads representing various objects that can evoke different emotions, such as an alarm light, smiley sun, bomb, raining cloud.]

Have you ever had times when you meant to provide others with constructive criticism but ended up hurting their feelings, or other times when your heart sank after hearing others’ well-intentioned remarks? As a Chinese student wading through the American waters of unfamiliar emotions and sensitivities, this happens all too often in my daily life….

Experiencing our body: The role of interoception

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[Black and white photo of a person sitting underwater at the bottom of a pool with light streaming in behind them.]

Our brain is constantly keeping track of the experience of our body in the environment, enabling us to determine where we are, how we feel, and respond appropriately. How does this work? Let’s find out!…

College of Arts + Sciences

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