For the 2015 Christmas Lecture, we were joined by Professor Tony Prescott and some of the team from Sheffield Robotics. The lecture was entitled “Are friends electric? Our future lives with robots” and was thoroughly enjoyed by the audience. We even got a cheeky look at some of the robots being designed and programmed at…
Category: Cognitive Psychology
The Science of Fear
What is your favourite scary movie? I don’t think I have one, but I did see some very good movies at Celluloid Screams, the Sheffield horror film festival at the Showroom. Watching a horror movie initiates the fight or flight mechanism that…
Hearing what you expect to hear.
Most of us have had the experience of finding a glaring error in some written work that we had previously checked several times. For example when blogging I often find at least one simple error on a post once it has actually been published, despite proofreading it thoroughly before submission. In such circumstances it seems…
Some sense in sensory deprivation
How would you cope if you couldn’t hear, see or feel anything? How do sensory systems react when they have no information to process? Such questions may seem rather bizarre, but they are in fact the topic of sensory deprivation research. Sensory deprivation involves systematically preventing information from reaching one or more sensory modalities. As…
Animal intelligence.
I have covered a wide range of topics throughout my Biomedical Science degree: but one thing that really sparks my interest that isn’t really biomed related are studies involving animal behaviour. Animal rights have recently been a hot topic, especially due to the viral article recently informing about the dolphin killing ritual in the Faroe…
Want to lie convincingly? Get practicing!
Lying, the deliberate attempt to mislead someone, is a processes that we all engage in at some time or another. Indeed research has found that the average person lies at least once a day, suggesting that lying is a standard part of social interaction (1). Despite its common occurrence lying is not an automatic process.…
A matter of inheritance
The age-old ‘nature-nurture’ debate revolves around understanding to what extent various traits within a population are determined by biological or environmental factors. In this context ‘traits’ can include not only aspects of personality, but also physical differences (e.g. eye colour) and differences in the vulnerability to disease. Investigating the nature-nurture question is important because it…
Spooky goings on in Psychology!
Given that it is Halloween, it seems only right to discuss some recent psychology experiments relating to potential paranormal phenomenon! Can ‘psychics’ sense information others can’t? Today Merseyside Sceptics Society published the results of a ‘Halloween psychic challenge’. They invited a number of the UK’s top psychics* to attempt to prove their abilities under controlled…
Food for the brain: How diet affects mental health
In a recent article published in the Guardian (originally available on his personal website) George Monbiot looked at recent scientific evidence suggesting a link between ‘junk food’ and Alzheimer’s disease (1). This prompted me to think about the wider subject of nutrition and mental health. It’s an uncomfortable subject to consider especially if, like me,…
How delusions occur, and why they may be widespread!
It is a common occurrence to come across people who believe things that seem extraordinary, and who maintain that belief even in the face of huge amounts of contradictory evidence. For example despite vast amounts of evidence suggesting otherwise, there are people who believe that aliens create crop circles, that astrology can predict their future,…