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Weight Gain Linked With Personality Trait Changes
People who gain weight are more likely to give in to temptations but also are more thoughtful about their actions, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. To understand how fluctuations in body weight might relate to personality changes, psychological scientist Angelina Sutin of the Florida State University College of Medicine and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) examined data from two large-scale longitudinal studies of Baltimore residents. “We know a great deal about how personality traits contribute to weight gain,” said Sutin.
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Super-Smart Kids Become Super-Successful Adults
Students with profound mathematical and verbal reasoning skills at age 13 garner more awards, gather more grant money, have more patents, write more prolifically, are more likely to graduate with doctoral degrees, and are more likely to hold tenured positions at the best universities in the world, according to new research published in Psychological Science. Psychological scientists Harrison Kell, David Lubinski, and Camilla Benbow of Vanderbilt University were interested in finding out just how successful super smart 13-year-olds would be later in life.
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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?
