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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. The Curse of Planning: Dissecting Multiple Reinforcement-Learning Systems by Taxing the Central Executive A. Ross Otto, Samuel J. Gershman, Arthur B. Markman, and Nathaniel D. Daw Under what conditions do individuals rely on model-based rather than model-free reinforcement-learning systems? The researchers had participants complete a multistep choice paradigm. On some trials, participants had to simultaneously perform a secondary task designed to tax working memory resources.
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Babies Expect People to Act Efficiently
Adults expect others to behave rationally and efficiently in their simple, everyday actions -- this is what enables us to predict the route someone will take walking on the sidewalk, for instance. Now, new research shows that infants hold the same expectations for the behavior of others. Even within the first two years of life, infants expect adults to behave rationally, efficiently, and consistently, according to the research, which is published in the April 2013 issue of Psychological Science.
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Elissa L. Newport
Georgetown University William James Fellow Award With a background in cognitive science and now a professor of neurology, Newport has devoted her career to studying human language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, with a focus on the relationship between language development and language structure. She studies both normal language acquisition and creolization using miniature languages presented to learners in the lab, where both the input and the structure of the language can be controlled. A second line of research for Newport concerns maturational effects on language learning.
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The Think Tank Gala
The Think Tank is a mobile cognitive science lab and education station. We’ll drive to schools and museums to inspire hundreds of young minds as we work to close the gender and race gap in science through experiential learning. Upcoming, Action-Packed Gala. With your help, we've raised enough to purchase the truck — and then some. The next step will be to make it sustainable: funding those visits to schools and cities for the next year and beyond. For said purpose, how might one plan the most insanely cool fundraising gala ever to take place in Manhattan?
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Larry Jacoby
Washington University in St. Louis William James Fellow Award Larry Jacoby is one of the world’s foremost researchers on memory — specifically on the distinction between consciously controlled and automatic processes. The distinction is useful for better understanding of age-related differences in memory performance, and for improved diagnosis and treatment of memory deficits. Under Jacoby’s leadership, the Aging, Memory & Cognitive Control Lab in Washington University’s psychology department has centered on questions related to cognitive control and to subjective experience. Other research extends the consciously controlled/automatic distinction to the domain of social psychology.
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John Swets
BBN Technologies (retired) William James Fellow Award John Swets is the intellectual father of signal detection theory (SDT) — an idea he borrowed from World War II radar experts and adapted for the study of human decision making. He has played a key role in adapting SDT as a central tool in the study of perception, and ultimately in the field of medical diagnostics. Both radar and the human mind have trouble detecting the few meaningful signals amid random noise. The tool that Swets and his colleagues developed — the so-called receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve — points the way to the best decision threshold for each unique problem.