Thursday, October 12, 2006

Either work hard if you want to be a good PhD student or just be a genius

A short essay in Nature discusses how the relationship between the number of hours a PhD student works and academic success. I agree that working too many hours or trying to fit academics into a 9-to-5 schedule is counterproductive. Taking weekend trips to parks and museums are better for nudging good ideas out of a person's cranial crevices, and not sitting in front of the emailer or knocking one's head against the wall.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Twenty years of Inhibition of return (IOR) research?!?! What's that?

In case you didn't know, inhibition of return is the phenomenon where a stimulus is presented in the same position on two sequential trials vs. two different locations (e.g., left then right). It has been shown that participants are slower and less accurate to respond to the first sequence (two same locations) than the second (two different locations). It's interesting to me because this seems counterintuitive to the spreading activation/priming notions, which I think have been a limiting metaphor for thinking about many issues in cognitive science for at least the last 30 years. The current issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology is a special issue on IOR and including a good introduction by Juan Lupiáñez as well as an article he co-authors with Ana Chica (first author).