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Winning Streak, Really?
Peter Ayton studies our judgment and decision making processes, especially where those processes often go wrong. He has investigated judgment errors like the hot-hand fallacy, in which people tend to expect that recent positive successes within a random sequence will continue—like a basketball player on a “hot” shooting streak—and the related gambler’s fallacy, in which people expect that such a positive or negative streak will eventually be balanced out.
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Imaging study reveals differences in brain function for children with math anxiety
Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown for the first time how brain function differs in people who have math anxiety from those who don’t. A series of scans conducted while second- and third-grade students did addition and subtraction revealed that those who feel panicky about doing math had increased activity in brain regions associated with fear, which caused decreased activity in parts of the brain involved in problem-solving.
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Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Convention
The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Convention will be held November 15 - 18, 2012 in National Harbor, MD. For more information visit: http://www.abct.org/Members/?m=mMembers&fa=Convention
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49th Annual Meeting of the Animal Behavior Society
The 49th Annual Meeting of the Animal Behavior Society will be held June 10 - 14, 2012 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For more information visit: http://animalbehaviorsociety.org/absmeetings/
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Crisscrossing Senses
Ever wonder what the number 5 tastes like? What color is G sharp? Or what type of personality does January have? If you were a synesthete, you might be able to answer these questions. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. More recently, scientists have speculated that babies are born synaesthetes and slowly lose those sensory connections as neurons are pruned as their brains develop. A recent article from Psychological Science Synaesthetic Associations Decrease During Infancy, provides some evidence for this theory.
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Developmental Rerouting
Scientists often think of the adult brain as being “modular,” containing many systems that each specialize in a given function like language or number, relatively independent of one another; this explains why damage to the mature brain in adults tends to impair certain brain functions while leaving others intact. However, Annette Karmiloff-Smith believed that this modular framework cannot be applied to the developing brain.
