Emily Sanford

Johns Hopkins University | JHU · Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences

Given a rich environment, how do we decide on what information to use? A view of a single entity (e.g., a group of birds) affords many distinct interpretations, including their number, average size, and spatial extent. An enduring challenge for cognition, therefore, is to focus resources on the most relevant evidence for any particular decision. In...

Humans are both the scientists who discover psychological laws and the thinkers who behave according to those laws. Oftentimes, when our natural behavior is in accord with those laws, this dual role serves us well: our intuitions about our own behavior can serve to inform our discovery of new laws. But, in cases where the laws that we discover thro...

Are there some differences so small that we cannot detect them? Are some quantities so similar (e.g., the number of spots on two speckled hens) that they simply look the same to us? Although modern psychophysical theories such as Signal Detection Theory would predict that, with enough trials, even minute differences would be perceptible at an above...

The Approximate Number System (ANS) allows humans and non-human animals to estimate large quantities without counting. It is most commonly studied in visual contexts (i.e., with displays containing different numbers of dots), although the ANS may operate on all approximate quantities regardless of modality (e.g., estimating the number of a series o...

Dogs are thought to evaluate humans’ emotional states, and attend more to crying people than humming people (Custance & Mayer, 2012). However, it is unclear whether dogs would go beyond focusing attention on humans in need by providing more substantive help to them. This study used a trapped-other paradigm, modified from use in research on rats (Be...

We investigated whether the surface area and convex hull of a dot stimulus could explain responses to numerosity in the same stimuli. We found that people responded differently when they attended to the number of dots than if they were attending to the size or spacing of the same stimuli.