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Predicting Psychosis
In the search for new ways to prevent and treat mental illnesses, scientists are refining their understanding of the interplay between environmental factors and brain development in these disorders. Elaine F. Walker has been instrumental in propelling this area of research forward. In one of her most well-known studies, she retrospectively examined childhood home movies of adult-onset schizophrenia patients and their healthy siblings using quantifiable behavioral observations. This approach was groundbreaking in examining real-time predictions of schizophrenia across the early developmental trajectory.
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The Flow of Happiness
Whether in the creative arts, athletics, work, or spiritual practice, happiness lies in working to expand one’s skill level. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has devoted his career to studying what makes people happy. Building on years of detailed research, Csikszentmihalyi created the term “flow” to describe the experience of being completely immersed in an activity for its own sake. When someone is in a state of flow, self-consciousness disappears and sense of time becomes distorted, according to Csikszentmihalyi’s research.
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The Poverty Trap
Poor people are the subject of many negative stereotypes, including the assumption that they are inherently incapable of making sound financial decisions. But APS Fellow Eldar Shafir has demonstrated that the cognitive load and bandwidth limitations imposed by living with scarcity can lead to bad financial choices that often trap people in a cycle of poverty. Shafir studies decision making, judgment, and behavioral economics. His recent research has focused on decision making in contexts of poverty and on the application of behavioral research to policy.
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Seeing and Perceiving
Considered one of the world’s most influential cognitive psychologists, Anne Treisman developed a classic psychological model of human visual attention. The feature integration theory of attention proposes a two-stage model for our perception of objects. The pre-attentive phase occurs automatically, before conscious awareness. In this stage, her research suggests, we register the elementary features of a visual stimulus, before our minds have grouped those features or bound them to an object. In the second phase, called the focused attention stage, we combine the features to perceive the specific object.
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The Nature of Language Acquisition
On a daily basis, infants and toddlers encounter a plethora of items ranging from animals to appliances their parents use. Despite their limited abilities to process information, even very young children are remarkably capable of learning the names of these objects. Ellen M. Markman conducted some of the pioneering research on the reasoning skills that infants and young children use to figure out the meanings of words. When someone points to an object and labels it, how do children conclude the label refers to the object itself, rather than its color, size, shape, texture, activity, attractiveness, and so on?
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Putting Thought Into Action
How do we get from thoughts to actions? David Rosenbaum’s research focuses on answers to that question. Using a range of research methods, including behavioral observation, brain-wave recordings, and computational modeling, Rosenbaum studies the planning and control of everyday physical activities. He and his colleagues have shown that physical actions reflect our surprisingly deep and subtle knowledge about the features of our bodies and our surrounding environment. His books include Human Motor Control, MATLAB For Behavioral Scientists, and It’s A Jungle In There: How Competition and Cooperation In The Brain Shape The Mind.
