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Patching the Leaky Pipeline of Women in STEM
March is designated Women’s History Month in the United States, recognizing “generations of women whose commitment to nature and the planet have proved invaluable to society.” And yet, as we celebrate the many advances and achievements of women across history, a stark fact remains: Women continue to be underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. It’s a complex issue, driven by many factors. Some point to existing biases and stereotypes related to women and their abilities, while others talk about gender differences in achievement motivation and self-image. Many emphasize the lack of visible women leaders and role models in STEM fields.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Beyond Gist: Strategic and Incremental Information Accumulation for Scene Categorization George L. Malcolm, Antje Nuthmann, and Philippe G. Schyns Scene categorization is generally thought of as a perceptually driven process, but in this study, the authors examined whether hierarchical categorization may be driven by both top-down and bottom-up processes. The authors examined the processes involved in categorizing scenes at different hierarchical levels by recording participants' eye movements as they categorized scenes at the basic or subordinate level.
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Kids Come to Like Their Own Before They Dislike “Outsiders”
Social groups form along all sorts of lines -- from nationality to age to shared interests, and everything in between. We come to identify with our groups, whichever those might be, to the point where we prefer people who belong to our groups and discriminate against those who don't. These group affiliations undoubtedly confer tangible and intangible benefits, but those benefits often come at a cost to members of other so-called out-groups. Given the consequences for human societies, researchers David Buttelman and Robert Bohm of the University of Erfurt in Germany set out to investigate the early origins of intergroup discrimination.
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Ways of Remembering
Larry Jacoby is one of the world’s foremost researchers on memory — specifically on the difference between conscious and automatic memory. The distinction is useful for better understanding age-related differences in memory performance. His studies reveal, for example, that our ability to recall specific events declines as we age, spurring us to rely on unconscious, automatic memories. These unconscious influences can be misleading, often tricking people into remembering events that never really occurred. In addition to further refining theory about memory, one of Jacoby’s fundamental research goals is to develop procedures for the diagnosis and treatment of memory deficits.
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European Association for Behavior Analysis Conference
The 7th biannual conference of the European Association for Behaviour Analysis (EABA) will be held in Stockholm, Sweden from September 10 through 13, 2014. Visit the EABA website to submit a paper, poster, or symposium or to view conference details.
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Busted Bracket? Science Suggests Strategy to Improve March Madness Picks
It’s official: No one on this planet will walk away with Warren Buffett’s $1 billion dollar prize for filling out a perfect March Madness bracket. Hopes for the money were quickly dashed after the second round of games in the NCAA college basketball tournament – Dayton topped Syracuse, Stanford snuffed out Kansas, and Kentucky ended Wichita State’s hopes for the first perfect NCAA season in almost 40 years. Suffice it to say, we all made wrong picks in one way or another. It’s likely that some people will blame their mistakes on the bracket “gurus” – those experts who allegedly know the ins and outs of each game in extraordinary detail.
