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The Road to Language Learning Is Iconic
Languages are highly complex systems and yet most children seem to acquire language easily, even in the absence of formal instruction. New research on young children’s use of British Sign Language (BSL) sheds light on one mechanism - iconicity - that may play an important role in children's ability to learn language. For spoken and written language, the arbitrary relationship between a word’s form – how it sounds or how it looks on paper – and its meaning is a particularly challenging feature of language acquisition. But one of the first things people notice about sign languages is that signs often represent aspects of meaning in their form.
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New Research On Visual Perception From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on visual perception from Psychological Science. Inattention Abolishes Binocular Rivalry: Perceptual Evidence Jan W. Brascamp and Randolph Blake Binocular rivalry occurs when a different image is shown to each eye and instead of seeing one image, the viewer shifts between the two images. In this study, researchers examined the effects of attention on binocular rivalry by presenting participants with visually different stimuli in each eye.
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New Insights Into Cognitive Control From Psychological Science
Read about new insights into cognitive control from Psychological Science and Current Directions in Psychological Science. Memory and Cognitive Control in Task Switching Franziska R. Richter and Nick Yeung Although researchers know that cognitive control affects memory and vice versa, the interconnections between these two have only recently been examined. Participants performed a classification task in which they were shown displays that contained task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimuli. Participants then performed a surprise recognition test that evaluated their memory for the previously presented stimuli.
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Taking on the Challenges of Replication in Psychological Science
Psychological science has come of age. But the rights of a mature discipline carry with them responsibilities, among them the responsibility to maximize confidence in our findings through good data practices and replication. The November issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), reflects the discipline’s ongoing commitment to examine methodological issues that affect all areas of science — such as failures to replicate previous findings and problems of bias and error — with the goal of strengthening our discipline and contributing to the discussion that is taking place throughout science.
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Self-Imagination Can Enhance Memory in Healthy and Memory-Impaired Individuals
There’s no question that our ability to remember informs our sense of self. Now research published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, provides new evidence that the relationship may also work the other way around: Invoking our sense of self can influence what we are able to remember. Research has shown that self-imagination – imagining something from a personal perspective – can be an effective strategy for helping us to recognize something we’ve seen before or retrieve specific information on cue.
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Children’s Preexisting Symptoms Influence Their Reactions to Disaster Coverage on TV
While the amount of exposure to disaster coverage on TV can impact children’s well-being, their preexisting symptoms of posttraumatic stress also play an important role.