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General Science

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!…

How did we find out that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs?

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[A large fireball is being hurtled toward the earth as two small dinosaurs look on, possibly in fear.]

If you ask almost any kid today how the dinosaurs died, they’ll tell you an asteroid killed them, but this didn’t used to be the leading theory. When you look at key papers about the asteroid impact the kids are referring to, you’ll learn that it defined the transition from the Cretaceous to the Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary ~66 million years ago. Before the discovery of the asteroid, there wasn’t a single agreed upon theory on what caused the 5th global mass extinction…

Increasing inclusivity one element at a time

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[Prof. Mona Minkara at the completed accessible, tactile 3D-printed Periodic Table in the exhibition hall at the National ACS meeting in San Diego, CA.]

Achieving full inclusion for people with disabilities in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics – STEAM – has become a global matter. People with disabilities in STEAM are underrepresented in postsecondary academic environments and the job market…

What makes a joke funny? Part 2

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[Image shows a man standing with a mike. Image is taken from the front. The background shows a poster which reads, 'Canvas laugh club'.]

Making others laugh is a tough job, but surely there are a few who have mastered it. So, what is the secret of their success? Is there a formula or a trick to being funny? This blog post tries to answer this question by discussing what psychologists and cognitive scientists (who take humor very seriously :p) have found out…

College of Arts + Sciences

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