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Pump Up The Bass, Feel Like A Boss
NPR: Jump-up songs make us feel capable and powerful. Athletes know that intuitively — batters swagger out to raucous walk-up songs, stars like Serena Williams and Lebron James warm up with headphones on (except when, in James's case, the headphones come off to blast Wu-Tang Clan in the locker room). But what is it about a good pump-up song that makes us feel invincible? According to a new study, the answer is in the bass. Read the whole story: NPR
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Introspective or Narcissistic?
The New York Times: Some people like to keep a journal. Some people think it’s a bad idea. People who keep a journal often see it as part of the process of self-understanding and personal growth. They don’t want insights and events to slip through their minds. They think with their fingers and have to write to process experiences and become aware of their feelings. People who oppose journal-keeping fear it contributes to self-absorption and narcissism. C.S. Lewis, who kept a journal at times, feared that it just aggravated sadness and reinforced neurosis. Gen.
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Visual ‘Gist’ Helps Us Figure Out Where a Crowd Is Looking
Have you ever seen a crowd of people looking off into the distance, perhaps toward a passing biker or up to the top of a building? There’s a good chance you looked there, too, instantly, even without paying attention to the individuals in the group. How can we tell where a crowd is looking with so little effort? Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Denver have discovered that we rely on a specialized visual process known as “ensemble coding” to perceive where a crowd is looking.
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Visual Exposure Predicts Infants’ Ability to Follow Another’s Gaze
Following another person’s gaze can reveal a wealth of information critical to social interactions and also to safety. Gaze following typically emerges in infancy, and new research looking at preterm infants suggests that it’s visual experience, not maturational age, that underlies this critical ability. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Seeing and Perceiving
Considered one of the world’s most influential cognitive psychologists, Anne Treisman developed a classic psychological model of human visual attention. The feature integration theory of attention proposes a two-stage model for our perception of objects. The pre-attentive phase occurs automatically, before conscious awareness. In this stage, her research suggests, we register the elementary features of a visual stimulus, before our minds have grouped those features or bound them to an object. In the second phase, called the focused attention stage, we combine the features to perceive the specific object.
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Smoking Up Behind the Wheel Linked to Risky Driving While Sober
Driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol has been tied in previous studies to other dangerous driving behaviors, like speeding and dangerous overtaking, but research investigating the relationship between cannabis and risk of car accidents has produced contradictory results. Psychological scientists Isabelle Richer and Jacques Bergeron of the University of Montreal looked at whether those who drive while under the influence of cannabis are more likely to engage in risky and aggressive driving behaviors in general. An all-male group of 75 participants was given a questionnaire asking about their driving habits, cannabis use, and history of car accidents.
