Lauren Rubenstein“We’ve moved the meeting/truck forward.” “That was a long wait/ hotdog.” "We’re rapidly approaching the deadline/guardrail.” English speakers use a shared vocabulary to talk about space and time. And though it’s not something we’re necessarily conscious of, psychologists have found that the identical words we use to describe our wait in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles and the length of an especially impressive hotdog are not a fluke, but rather are telling of the cognitive processes involved in thinking about time. Past studies have shown that priming people with spatial information actually influences their perceptions of time. For example, people primed to imagine…
Hilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the co-author of "Active (not passive) spatial imagery primes temporal judgements." Written along with Jessica Sullivan of the University of California-San Diego, the article was published in the June 2012 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. For this article, Barth and Sullivan looked deeper into the previously demonstrated cognitive connections between how we think about space and time. They found that only when people are asked to imagine actively moving themselves through space are their perceptions of time influenced. When participants in the experiment were primed with a similar…
Olivia DrakeJessica Sullivan '08; Barbara Juhasz, assistant professor of psychology; and Hilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, are the co-authors of a paper titled, "Adults’ number-line estimation strategies: Evidence from eye movements," published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Issue 18, pages 557-563, in June 2011.
Corrina KerrHilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, was recently awarded a five-year, $761,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study “magnitude biases in mathematical cognition, learning, and development.” Barth will be conducting a series of studies with children and adults in the Cognitive Development Laboratory at Wesleyan to investigate abstract and perceptual magnitude biases. The grant, which begins this year, comes from the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program. The program is only available to non-tenured faculty. Barth’s colleague Anna Shusterman was awarded a CAREER grant in 2009. “The psychology department is thrilled about Professor Barth's accomplishment,” says Lisa…
Hilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, and Annie Paladino ’09, are the authors of a new article on children’s numerical thinking, based on data collected by Paladino with support from her Hughes fellowship for research in the life sciences. The article is titled "The development of numerical estimation: Evidence against a representational shift." It will appear in the journal Developmental Science in 2010.