-
The Challenges of Driving While Dyslexic
Street signs are almost as old as roads themselves. Evidence for road signs goes at least as far back as ancient Rome, where milestones along roads were inscribed with information to help travelers navigating their way across the huge Roman Empire. Since the invention of the automobile, drivers have been lobbying for ways to make road signs easier to read at highway speeds. In 1895, the Italian Touring Club kicked off the call for better European road signs, and in 1905 the state of New York began systematically installing road signs throughout in the US. Virtually no research went into ensuring that these early road signs were actually legible for drivers.
-
Not All Mind Wandering Is Created Equal
Mind wandering—sometimes seen as daydreaming or “zoning out”—has been shown to facilitate creative thinking and problem solving, but in the wrong context it can become distracting or even dangerous. Inattentive students can get behind in class, and drivers who aren’t paying attention to the road are far more likely to end up in accidents. And for some professions, like surgeons or air traffic controllers, zoning out on the job can lead to disaster.
-
Handling Money Appears to Sway Helpfulness
The cold touch of a nickel may be enough to keep people from helping each other, new research suggests. In a new set of experiments in Poland, a team of researchers found that priming children with money by having them sort coins into their different denominations, as opposed to sorting different colored buttons, influenced how they behaved afterward when tasked with helping experimenters gather crayons. The children who handled money helped the experimenters significantly less than the children who sorted buttons.
-
Rise of Science Linked With Greater Attention to Cause and Effect
A new study shows that as science, education, and technology have taken on prominent roles in society over the past two centuries, the frequency of cause-and-effect language used in English texts has also increased, suggesting links between culture and cognition over time. Led by University of Michigan researcher Robert Axelrod and Rumen Iliev, a former University of Michigan postdoctoral researcher, the study builds on previous studies that link cognitive processing to cultural and societal factors. Unlike previous cross-cultural work that compared different cultures at the same point of time, this project focused on comparing the same culture at different time points.
-
New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: I Think, Therefore Eyeblink: The Importance of Contingency Awareness in Conditioning Gabrielle Weidemann, Michelle Satkunarajah, and Peter F. Lovibond Associative learning in humans is thought to be able to occur both unconsciously and consciously; however, studies of this dual-system for learning have produced conflicting results. Participants performed a conditioning task in which one of several stimuli was paired with a puff of air. Researchers manipulated how much information they gave participants about the pairing, giving them no information, some information, or detailed information.
-
Why Your Office Isn’t Doing You Any Favors
The business world is not known for being warm and fuzzy, but new research demonstrates that the workplace really can stifle generous behavior. “In five studies, using both attitudinal and behavioral measures, we consistently found that people primed to think of themselves in an organizational context (e.g., co-worker) felt less motivated to reciprocate, and did reciprocate than those in an otherwise parallel personal (e.g., friend or acquaintance) situation,” writes Stanford University researchers Peter Belmi and Jeffrey Pfeffer. Previous research has shown that reciprocation is a strong, and often automatic, social norm.
