Have you ever wondered why some teaching methods seem to work better than others? Recent research highlights the power of “multimodal enrichment”—a teaching approach that engages multiple senses or movements, such as hearing and seeing a new word simultaneously. Far from being just a trendy technique, this method…
In the autumn of 2022, my dissertation student Ria Amirapu did just that. She had started her studies during the Covid-19 Pandemic and had witnessed the effects of the lockdowns on her Indian friends and family. In particular, she noticed that her female friends were struggling with the level of…
There are lots of different ways in which we might encounter numerical information as we move through the world; for example, written digits, spoken or written number words, dice, Roman numerals, or just collections of objects. A key question for psychologists is how this kind of information is processed and…
Given that food is an essential requirement for all living beings, it is not surprising that we have an automatic inclination to move towards food. This approach bias (i.e., our tendency to move towards things we like or find appealing) can be influenced by many things, including how hungry we…
Research in the School of Psychology has been helping uncover the origins of stereotypes.
Stereotypes are bits of information associated with social categories (e.g., Scottish people are miserly, scientists are geeky, and men like the colour blue). Regardless of whether we believe them to be true we all have extensive…
When we interact with other people, we often find it relatively easy to understand the meaning behind their behaviour, and the reasons for why they act how they do often come to us unbidden. We seem to just know why our child drags us towards a shop window, why our…
Our eyes are continuously bombarded by an enormous amount of visual information – millions of shapes, colours and ever-changing motion all around us. For the brain, this is no easy feat. On the one hand, the visual world alters continuously because of changes in light, viewpoint and other factors. On…
One important learning tool in the classroom is metacognition, which involves thinking about and managing your own thinking. For example, when you pause halfway through reading a textbook and realise you haven't absorbed the material, you are engaging in metacognition by monitoring your own thought process.
Being aware of how…
