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Babies Picky About Who They Imitate
LiveScience: Babies are famous for copying adults, but a new study shows that little ones carefully choose whether to imitate an adult's actions based on how credible they think the adult is. For example, if an adult has previously displayed unreliable or dishonest behavior, the baby is less likely to mimic them, according to the study. Researchers divided 60 babies between 13 months and 16 months into two groups. In the first group, "unreliable" experimenters looked inside a container while expressing excitement, and invited the babies to discover whether the box contained a toy or was empty. For that group's experiment, the box was empty.
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Sound and vision work hand in hand
Yahoo! India: A new study has revealed that our senses of sight and hearing work closely together, perhaps more than people realize. In the study of how one sense can affect another, Ladan Shams, aUCLA associate professor of psychology and her colleagues showed 63 participants a large number of dots on a screen in two separate phases, with a break between the phases. In one phase, the dots moved around randomly; in the other, some of the dots moved together from right to left. In both phases, the dots were accompanied by sound. Participants were divided into three groups.
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Why all parents have a favourite child
The Telegraph: In front of me I have two so-called “baby books”, both given to me as presents, in which I was supposed to chronicle the infant achievements of my sons, George and Johnny. George’s has been meticulously filled in: everything from the names of the midwives who delivered him, to the order in which his teeth came through, his first illness (conjunctivitis) and an account of his first Christmas so overwrought with emotion that it makes the Nativity itself seem like the warm-up act. And Johnny’s baby book? Empty. Not a thing. Not even a record of his birth weight, or his middle names — which, I must admit, I am struggling to remember. That’s not all.
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¿Por qué algunas personas son mejores que otras recordando rostros?
AOL Latino: ¿Has conocido a una persona que se presenta contigo en varias ocasiones y siempre como si fuera la primera vez, o quizás a alguien que te ha dicho, "yo te recuerdo de algún lugar, tu cara me es familiar"? Un nuevo estudio realizado por la Beijin Normal University y publicado en el Psychological Science afirma que cuánto una persona puede o no recordar un rostro tiene una explicación científica. Según reportara Science Daily, en un día normal el ser humano reconoce rostros holística y analíticamente, esto al encontrar similitudes en partes del cuerpo del individuo como los ojos o la nariz.
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Why Aren’t We Smarter?
Astrobiology Magazine: We put a lot of energy into improving our memory, intelligence, and attention. There are even drugs that make us sharper, such as Ritalin and caffeine. But maybe smarter isn’t really all that better. A new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, warns that there are limits on how smart humans can get, and any increases in thinking ability are likely to come with problems. The authors looked to evolution to understand about why humans are only as smart as we are and not any smarter.
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Individuals Are Removed Of Blame When In Groups
Scientific American: Groupthink is a phenomenon in which the members of a group override their individuality in favor of unanimity. Scholars have ascribed bad decision making to groupthink, for example, in U.S. policy during the Vietnam War. But how do outsiders interpret groupthink when they observe the behavior of a group and its members? A research team had subjects rate groups, such as corporations, sports teams and government parties, about how much the group has its own collective intelligence. Subjects also rated how much each member of the group had a mind of his or her own. Finally, they rated the perceived cohesiveness of the group. Listen here: Scientific American
