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Studying Perception of Animate Versus Inanimate Objects With LEGO Blocks
Animate objects, such as animals and humans, hold a special sway over humans’ attention. For example, when presented with two scenes (one containing an animal and one not), people will preferentially orient to the one containing the animal. People are also faster and more accurate at detecting change in animate objects compared with inanimate objects The privileged attention of animate objects compared with inanimate objects makes sense from an evolutionary viewpoint, as it has historically been — and continues to be — important to quickly determine if one is seeing a friend or foe, a predator or prey. In a 2016 study, Mitchell R. P.
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RAND Summer Institute Announces Two Conferences on Aging
RAND announces its two annual RAND Summer Institute conferences that address issues facing our aging population: The Mini-Medical School for Social Scientists on July 10–11, and the Demography, Economics, Psychology, and Epidemiology of Aging conference on July 12–13, 2017. The conferences will convene at the RAND Corporation headquarters in Santa Monica, California and are sponsored by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Behavioral and Social Scientists Research. Qualified Institute applicants must hold a PhD or have completed two years of a PhD program and be actively working on a dissertation.
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What’s the Big Idea? How Gender Influences Perceptions of Genius
New research suggests that the metaphors we use to frame innovations can bias our perceptions of who is capable of coming up with the next big idea.
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SRCD Call for Letters of Intent for Two New Programs Focusing on State Early Childhood Policy
The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) is seeking letters of intent for two new State Policy Programs that it will be piloting in 2017–2018: the Pre-doctoral State Policy Scholars Program in Early Learning, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Post-doctoral State Policy Fellowship in Early Childhood, funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation. The deadline to submit letters of intent is December 19, 2016. More information about the pilot State Policy Programs is available online. For questions, please email [email protected].
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Two Priming Effects to Be Examined in New Registered Replication Reports With Combined Protocol
APS is excited to announce two new Registered Replication Report (RRR) projects. These reports will be published in APS’s new journal, Advances in Methodologies and Practices in Psychological Science
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Do You See the Forest or the Tree? Neural Gain and Breadth Versus Focus in Perceptual Processing Eran Eldar, Yael Niv, and Jonathan D. Cohen How is the balance between focus and breadth determined during perceptual processing? The authors hypothesized that this balance is determined by neural gain such that high gain leads to perceptual processing being dominated by the most salient signal (focus), whereas low gain results in weak and strong inputs producing more equal neural activity (breadth).
