- What did Hartline's horseshoe crab experiments reveal about lateral inhibition between photoreceptors?
Sensory Perception
How organisms perceive taste, smell, touch, and other stimuli.
- What proved the pigeons were generalizing an artistic style rather than memorizing specific paintings?
- Why do laboratories need a standardised tea-brewing method when comparing different teas?
- How many genes encode olfactory receptor proteins, and why did this make it the largest known gene family?
- Why does each sensory neuron in the nose express only one type of odour receptor?
- How does the brain combine signals from different receptor types to identify a specific smell?
- Why does smell reach the brain through a route linked to memory and emotion?
- What did Oppenheimer's studies find about how readers judge needlessly complex writing?
- How were rats trained to distinguish spoken Japanese from spoken Dutch?
- Why did the rats' ability to distinguish the two languages collapse when sentences were played backwards?
- What does this experiment suggest about the auditory machinery shared between humans and other mammals?
- Why did volunteers report more pain relief from the identical sugar pill when told it cost more?
- How did Zampini and Spence's headphone experiment show that crunch sound affects the perceived freshness of a potato chip?
- What does this experiment reveal about how the brain combines sound, texture, and smell to construct the experience of taste?
- How did the placebo-alcohol experiment at a Grenoble discotheque test whether confidence comes from chemistry or expectation?
- What role did the sober assessors play in establishing that the self-ratings were inflated?
- What makes olfactory ensheathing cells unusually capable of supporting nerve regrowth?
- How did surgeons use Darek Fidyka's own nasal tissue to bridge his severed spinal cord?
- What is pareidolia and why do people see faces in toast or clouds?
- How does the mirror box illusion trick the brain into updating its body map?
- What does this experiment suggest about how much the brain trusts vision over touch?
- How did looking between the legs change subjects' perception of distance and size?
- What role does the body's orientation relative to gravity play in how the visual system judges space?
- Which body site did bin Saif and colleagues find was both the itchiest and most satisfying to scratch?
- How did the researchers induce and measure itch and scratch satisfaction on the ankle, forearm, and back?
- How do Piezo channels give the body its sense of touch and proprioception?
- Why did participants rate the placebo with listed side effects as more effective than the one without?
- What physiological and behavioral modalities does the CLARE dataset combine to capture real-time cognitive load, and why use multiple signal types together?
- How can eye-tracking parameters be used to distinguish intrinsic, extraneous, and germane cognitive load as separate, continuous measures rather than a single total load signal?
- How does working memory capacity, measured via an operation span task, relate to eye movement patterns during learning under varying cognitive load conditions?