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Adele and the Margaret Thatcher Effect
Adele’s face is the latest victim of a viral illustration of perceptual illusions. During the past week, an image of Adele’s upside down-face has gone viral on the internet, with instructions that read “turn your phone upside down” or “look at the image upside down.” If you haven’t done the experiment yourself, it looks something…
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Highlights of “Building Minds”
For those who missed “Building Minds: Microchips & Molecules”, here is a taste of the action. For all who packed the CNSI auditorium in May for our annual interdisciplinary symposium, here is a quick trip down memory lane. Enjoy! Gimzewski (’15 symposium) UCLA’s James Gimzewski cited Alan Turing in his talk describing his research on…
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Serial: the Case of Memory
Serial has quickly become an international obsession. From the master storytellers of This American Life, the focal story of the inaugural season is about details surrounding the 1999 conviction of then high-school student Adnan Syed for the murder of ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. A new episode is released every Thursday (this week will be the…
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A New Direction in Autism Research: Google Cloud
Autism is everywhere and it is great! I’m not referring to the recent CDC estimate that 1 in 68 children in the U. S. are diagnosed with the disorder. Instead, I’m talking about its presence in the news. Most recently, I’ve read that the Vatican is holding an inaugural conference on autism, “The Person…
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What is color (in vision)?
Roses are red, Violets are blue, And you probably think That the sky is blue too. Color, however, exists only in the mind: Color is our experience that maps onto the physical luminance properties of visible light and visible-light reflectance properties of objects. Psychologists call this color perception, to recognize that color is more a property…
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Feeling the Love [Hormone]: the Oxytocin Receptor
![Feeling the Love [Hormone]: the Oxytocin Receptor](https://sites.lifesci.ucla.edu/psych-pia/wp-content/uploads/sites/290/2014/04/Oxytocin3d-300x240-1.png)
Oxytocin has gotten a lot of hype as the biological basis of our favorite human emotion, Love. Oxytocin is a hormone produced by the hypothalamus and released by the posterior pituitary gland. The oxytocin system is involved in HPA axis and autonomic nervous system functions as well as reproductive functions and social behaviors. We are coming…
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Light it up!
From Empire State Building to the Sydney Opera House, iconic landmarks around the world are shining blue at night in honor of the sixth annual United Nations-sanctioned World Autism Awareness Day. “Light It Up Blue” is a global-initiative lead by Autism Speaks and spans throughout April as part of Autism Awareness Month. There is no…
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How does the brain support parent-child attachment?
Experiences early in life, when infants are highly dependent on their caregivers, can have profound effects on the brain. Research has shown that even young infants quickly learn the special relevance of their caregiver. For example, infants prefer their caregivers to strangers, learn to stay close to their caregivers, and are soothed by their caregivers…
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Graduate Program Interviews: Cognitive Psychology
So you applied to PhD programs in Psychology in the fall, with some kind of interest or focus in cognitive psychology – memory, attention, perception, thinking, learning, cognitive neuroscience, computational modeling of cognition, etc. Now interviews are coming up. Want to get the inside scoop on the interviewing/decision process? What questions to ask, what to…
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Outreach Event: Brain Booths!
Psychology in Action’s Outreach Initiative teamed up with Interaxon, an interdepartmental undergraduate neuroscience educational outreach group at UCLA, to participate in two events with the Los Angeles community. To learn about future Interaxon events, please visit their web calendar. On Saturday, October 19th, 2013, Psychology in Action and Interaxon members hosted a “Brain Booth” at STEAM Nation in Culver…