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New Research From Psychological Science
Learned Predictiveness Speeds Visual Processing Jennifer L. O'Brien and Jane E. Raymond Can learning the predictive value of a cue for a specific outcome affect the visual processing of that cue? Participants were presented with face pairs and were asked to choose one of the two faces. Each face choice was related to a high or a low probability of winning or losing money during the task. Participants were then shown novel faces and faces from the previous task and were asked to indicate whether the face was "old" or "new." Faces that were highly predictive of monetary wins or losses on the previous task were recognized faster than faces associated with low predictability of wins or losses.
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Something for the weekend
Financial Times: It is estimated that this year the worldwide spend on advertising will be around $530bn. For advertisers it is vital that they spend their money wisely - targeting the right consumer to get their message across. Traditionally advertisers tailor their campaigns to specific demographic groups, retired professionals or young mothers for example. But now new research has highlighted an alternative approach – targeting personality profiles. Academics from North America selected five personality traits: agreeableness, extraversion, emotional stability, openness to experience and conscientiousness.
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Scientists Look to Genetics of Behavior for Answers to Country’s Partisan Divide
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Scientific analysis has been able to solve the mysteries of polio and smallpox, heavier-than-air flight, the structure of atoms, and millions of other longstanding puzzles of nature. Could it now be used to diagnose and perhaps even solve our nation's political dysfunction? There are grounds for some optimism. A new generation of university researchers, many with backgrounds in psychology, are tackling the question, armed with new findings involving behavioral genetics. The leaders include John T.
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What’s Different About The Brains Of People With Autism?
NPR: Like a lot of people with autism, Jeff Hudale has a brain that's really good at some things. "I have an unusual aptitude for numbers, namely math computations," he says. Hudale can do triple-digit multiplication in his head. That sort of ability helped him get a degree in engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. But he says his brain struggles with other subjects like literature and philosophy. "I like working with things that are rather concrete and structured," he says. "Yeah, I like things with some logic and some rules to it." So Hudale, who is 40, does fine at his job at a bank. But he doesn't do so well with social interactions, where logic and rules aren't so obvious.
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Research Finds Students Short on Study Savvy
Education Week: Students are least likely to choose to test themselves while studying, although it has been shown to be the most effective study strategy, according to researchers here at the Association for Psychological Science conference. "It's a remarkable feature of our educational system that we give students so much stuff to learn and rarely tell them how to go about learning that stuff," said Purdue University psychologist Jeffrey D. Karpicke. "Learners tend to think of 'how do I get all this stuff into my head?' and they don't spend much time considering how they will get all of that stuff back out of their heads when the time comes to retrieve it.
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Babies’ Hunger to Learn Has a ‘Goldilocks Effect’
The New York Times: Infants are constantly trying to make sense of the world around them, and they do this by seeking out situations that are neither too simple nor too complex. Writing in the journal PLoS One, a team of researchers from the University of Rochester call it the “Goldilocks effect.” Babies “are seeking out the type of learning material from the world that’s most efficient for them to learn from,” said the study’s lead author, Celeste Kidd, a cognitive scientist at the university. Her team measured the attention patterns of 72 infants, ages 7 and 8 months, as they watched video animations while an eye-tracking device below the screen followed their gaze.
