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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Children's Arithmetic Development: It Is Number Knowledge, Not the Approximate Number Sense, That Counts Silke M. Göbel, Sarah E. Watson, Arne Lervåg, and Charles Hulme To examine whether approximate number sense and knowledge of the Arabic numeral system influence future arithmetic ability, children were assessed for nonverbal ability, vocabulary, number-identification skill, letter-comparison ability, magnitude-comparison ability, and arithmetic skill at age 6 and again for magnitude-comparison ability and arithmetic skill 11 months later.
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Gesturing With Hands Is a Powerful Tool for Children’s Math Learning
Children who use their hands to gesture during a math lesson gain a deep understanding of the problems they are taught, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Previous research has found that gestures can help children learn. This study in particular was designed to answer whether abstract gesture can support generalization beyond a particular problem and whether abstract gesture is a more effective teaching tool than concrete action.
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Young Children Form First Impressions From Faces
Just like adults, children as young as 3 tend to judge an individual’s character traits, such as trustworthiness and competence, simply by looking at the person’s face, new research shows. And they show remarkable consensus in the judgments they make, the findings suggest. The research, led by psychological scientist Emily Cogsdill of Harvard University, shows that the predisposition to judge others based on physical features starts early in childhood and does not require years of social experience. The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Far-Out Thinking: Generating Solutions to Distant Analogies Promotes Relational Thinking Michael S. Vendetti, Aaron Wu, and Keith J. Holyoak The authors examined whether inducing a general mindset using a verbal-analogy task would promote more abstract thinking on a subsequent unrelated reasoning task. Participants solved analogies with near or far semantic relations, either by indicating whether the analogy was valid or invalid or by generating a valid completion for an incomplete analogy. Participants then completed a picture-mapping task that used unrelated materials.
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Dishonesty and Creativity: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
New research shows that lying about performance on one task may increase creativity on a subsequent task by making people feel less bound by conventional rules. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “The common saying that ‘rules are meant to be broken’ is at the root of both creative performance and dishonest behavior,” says lead researcher Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School.
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When Faced With a Hard Decision, People Tend to Blame Fate
Life is full of decisions. Some, like what to eat for breakfast, are relatively easy. Others, like whether to move cities for a new job, are quite a bit more difficult. Difficult decisions tend to make us feel stressed and uncomfortable – we don’t want to feel responsible if the outcome is less than desirable. New research suggests that we deal with such difficult decisions by shifting responsibility for the decision to fate. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Fate is a ubiquitous supernatural belief, spanning time and place,” write researchers Aaron Kay, Simone Tang, and Steven Shepherd of Duke University.