Ifmemory evolved, sculpted by the processes of natural selection, then its operating characteristics likely bear the ‘‘footprints’’ of ancestral selection pressures. Psychologists rarely consider this possibility and generally ignore functional questions in their attempt to understand how human memory works. We propose that memory evolved to enhance reproductive fitness and, accordingly, its sy...

Background: There seems to be a common belief that women are better in multi-tasking than men, but there is practically no scientific research on this topic. Here, we tested whether women have better multi-tasking skills than men. Methods: In Experiment 1, we compared performance of 120 women and 120 men in a computer-based task-switching paradigm. In Experiment 2, we compared a different group...

Assurance cases are widely used in the safely domain, where they provide a way to justify the safety of a system and render that justification open to review. Assurance cases have not been widely used in security, but there is guidance available and there have been some promising experiments. There are a number of differences between safety and security which have implications for how we create...