-
Goalkeepers of losing teams dive to right, study says
BBC News: A study of penalty shoot-outs in World Cup matches from 1982 to 2010 showed keepers usually had an even chance of going left or right to defend the goal. But the higher pressure of a losing position pushed them more to the right. The study, to be published in Psychological Science, suggests humans' "right-oriented" brains are to blame. Read more: BBC News
-
Toys May Shape Language Development
Yahoo News: Toddlers who play with different-shaped objects learn new words twice as fast as those who play with objects that have similar shapes, a new study finds. University of Iowa researchers worked with 16 children who were 18 months old and knew about 17 object names at the start of the study. Some children were taught the names of objects by playing with toys that were nearly identical, while others played with toys that were significantly different. Read more: Yahoo News
-
Het geheim achter voetbalpenalty’s
Metro Nederland: Links of rechts duiken? Dat is de grote vraag en het keuzemoment van keepers als er strafschoppen worden genomen. Maar nu beweert een groep Nederlandse psychologen dat ze een antwoord hebben op deze eeuwige vraag. Uit onderzoek blijkt dat keepers de neiging hebben om in de rechterhoek te duiken wanneer hun team aan de verliezende hand is tijdens een Wereldkampioenschap. De resultaten hiervan worden gepubliceerd in Psychological Science, een belangrijk tijdschrift in de psychologie. Lees meer/Read more: Metro Nederland
-
What the Stanford prison experiment taught us — and didn’t teach us — about evil
Boston Globe: Via Longreads, Stanford Magazine has a fascinating piece on the infamous Stanford prison experiment. For those who never took a psychology class, in August of 1971 a psychologist named Phil Zimbardo and his colleagues took a bunch of male college students, divided them into "guards" and "prisoners," stuck them in a fake prison on the Stanford campus, and observed their subsequent interactions.
-
Our Brains Have Multiple Mechanisms For Learning
One of the most important things humans do is learning this kind of pattern: when A happens, B follows. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines how people learn, and finds that they use different mental processes in different situations. “There's a long history in the field of psychology of two different approaches to thinking about how we learn,” says James McClelland of Stanford University, who cowrote the paper with graduate student Daniel Sternberg. One is learning by association; Pavlov's dog learned to associate food with the sound of a bell.
-
Vokale vermitteln Größe
ORF News Austria: Die Forscher arbeiteten mit 28 Babys im Alter von vier Monaten. Ihre Muttersprache war Spanisch. Sie spielten den Babys Silben vor, die aus Konsonanten und den Vokalen I, O, E oder A zusammengesetzt waren. Bedeutung hatten die Silben keine. Während die Babys eine Silbe hörten, zeigten ihnen die Forscher gleichzeitig mehrere geometrische Figuren. Die Kreise, Ovale, Quadrate und Dreiecke waren unterschiedlich groß und hatten verschiedene Farben. Mit einem sogenannten Eyetracker wurde das Blickverhalten der Babys aufgezeichnet. Hörten die Babys Silben mit den Vokalen I und E, fiel ihr Blick als erstes auf kleinere geometrische Figuren.
