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Solving For X, Among the Neurons
Huffington Post: I have a fence that needs scraping and painting, and I'm pretty sure I can do the whole job in six hours. My friend Jack, who is an experienced painter, wants me to hire him. He promises he can have a new coat of paint on the fence in four hours. I'm tempted, but I'm wondering, what if Jack and I work together? If he does the trim and other detail work, and I do the easy brushing, we should be able to wrap this job up by lunchtime, easy. But how long will it take, exactly?
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Lolo’s No Choke
TIME: Choke. The word just sounds so noxious, really. Never mind its ties to suffocation and death. Just say it: choke. Athletes in particular would like to strangle the scribe who first applied such an ugly term to their most spectacular — and public — failures. Count Lolo Jones among them. Jones, the telegenic American hurdler, lived through a nightmare in Beijing. With a commanding lead in the 100-m event, on the verge of taking the gold and winning Americans’ hearts with her good looks and homeless-to-heroine story, she clipped the ninth hurdle. There are 10 of them. She stumbled across the line to finish in seventh place, then tumbled to the ground in a pool of tears.
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Even a fake grin may help lower heart rate in stressful situations
CBS News: A fake smile might be better for you than no grin at all, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Kansas discovered that if people were told to hold a facial position similar to smiling - whether they knew they were supposed to be grinning or not - they had lower heart rates after a stressful situation. "This is not going to cure you if you have chronic stress or a major life event like a tornado," Dr. Sarah Pressman, assistant professor of psychology and co-author of the study, told HealthPop. "But, it's almost impossible to be really angry or really stressed with this big smile on your face....
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George A. Miller, a Pioneer in Cognitive Psychology, Is Dead at 92
The New York Times: Psychological research was in a kind of rut in 1955 when George A. Miller, a professor at Harvard, delivered a paper titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” which helped set off an explosion of new thinking about thinking and opened a new field of research known as cognitive psychology. The dominant form of psychological study at the time, behaviorism, had rejected Freud’s theories of “the mind” as too intangible, untestable and vaguely mystical. Its researchers instead studied behavior in laboratories, observing and recording test subjects’ responses to carefully administered stimuli. Mainly, they studied rats. Dr.
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New Research on Cognition from Psychological Science
Read about new research on cognitive processes - including processes involved in learning, theory of mind, and cognitive control - published in Psychological Science, Current Directions in Psychological Science, and Perspectives on Psychological Science. Cognitive Load Disrupts Implicit Theory-of-Mind Processing Dana Schneider, Rebecca Lam, Andrew P. Bayliss, and Paul E. Dux A recently proposed framework explaining Theory of Mind (ToM) suggests there is one system that develops early and operates implicitly and another system that develops later and depends on domain-general cognitive functions.
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The History of Decision Making
APS Fellow Gerd Gigerenzer is the Director at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany, where he investigates how humans and other animals make decisions and use cognitive strategies when facing uncertainty. The findings are used in training and informing law students, judges, and mangers. Gigerenzer is also the Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany. Watch Gerd Gigerenzer discuss his research on human decision making in this series of interviews.