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Super Rare Items Are Most Likely to Be Missed
Various jobs in security, medicine, and other fields require employees to pick out a target item in the midst of lots of distracting information. To complicate matters, the targets that are are most important to find – say, a weapon or a malignant tumor – are also incredibly rare. So, how are we at picking out these kinds of ultra-rare targets? Not very good at all, according to new research from Stephen Mitroff and Adam Biggs of Duke University. The researchers took advantage of anonymous data provided by an app called “Airport Scanner,” developed by Kedlin Co.
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Meditation May Help Us Cut Our Losses
There are certain things that are notoriously hard for us to do: Leaving the theater halfway through a terrible movie, deciding to quit a craft project that doesn't look like it ought to, pushing away a less-than-exciting home-cooked meal. We have a hard time doing these things thanks to what researchers call the “sunk cost” bias: We feel compelled to continue with something just because we've already invested money, time, and/or effort into it. In these cases, we aren't rewarded for our perseverance -- the movie will still be bad, the craft project will still be sad-looking, and the food will still taste bland.
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Register Online for the 2014 AAAS Meeting in Chicago
Registration for the 2014 AAAS Meeting, to be held February 13–17, 2014, in Chicago, is now open. Online press registration is available until January 22, 2014. The conference will include more than 160 symposia, seminars, and lectures focused on cutting-edge research from leading scientists.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Attitudes Toward Arab Ascendance: Israeli and Global Perspectives Felicia Pratto, Tamar Saguy, Andrew L. Stewart, Davide Morselli, Rob Foels, Antonio Aiello, Maria Aranda, Atilla Cidam, Xenia Chryssochoou, Kevin Durrheim, Veronique Eicher, Laurent Licata, James H.
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Prosocial Media Linked With Empathy Across Cultures
Media and video games that portray cooperation and caring have a positive influence on behavior, a cross-cultural study shows.
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Exploring the Space-Time Continuum…in the Mind
We often use words related to space to talk about time, describing the order of events in terms of “moving forward,” “looking back,” “thinking ahead,” and “lagging behind.” In fact, research suggests that people typically think about events on a timeline that right from left (past) to right (future). But is the ability to mentally represent space necessary for representing events on a mental timeline? Researcher Lera Boroditsky and colleagues decided to investigate this question by looking at mental representation of time in participants who had suffered strokes to the right hemisphere of the brain.
