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Get Me Out of this Slump! Visual Illusions Improve Sports Performance
One way players might be able to improve their chances at making key shots is by tricking themselves into thinking the goal, the basket, or the target is bigger than it really is.
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In Recognizing Faces, the Whole is Not Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts
How do we recognize a face? To date, most research has answered “holistically”: We look at all the features—eyes, nose, mouth—simultaneously and, perceiving the relationships among them, gain an advantage over taking in each feature individually. Now a new study overturns this theory. The researchers—Jason M. Gold and Patrick J. Mundy of the Indiana University and Bosco S. Tjan of the University of Southern California—found that people’s performance in recognizing a whole face is no better than their performance with each individual feature shown alone. “Surprisingly, the whole was not greater than the sum of its parts,” says Gold.
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Want to Limit Aggression? Practice Self-Control!
Feeling angry and annoyed with others is a daily part of life, but most people don’t act on these impulses. What keeps us from punching line-cutters or murdering conniving co-workers? Self-control. A new review article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines the psychological research and finds that it’s possible to deplete self-control—or to strengthen it by practice. Criminologists and sociologists have long believed that people commit violent crimes when an opportunity arises and they’re low on self-control. “It’s an impulsive kind of thing,” says Thomas F.
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Stumped by a Problem? This Technique Unsticks You
Stuck solving a problem? Seek the obscure, says Tony McCaffrey, a psychology PhD from the University of Massachusetts. “There’s a classic obstacle to innovation called ‘functional fixedness,’ which is the tendency to fixate on the common use of an object or its parts. It hinders people from solving problems.” McCaffrey has developed a systematic way of overcoming that obstacle: the “generic parts technique” (GPT), which he describes in the latest issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. The article also reports on McCaffrey’s test of GPT’s effectiveness.
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Two Heads Are Not Always Better Than One
From the corporate boardroom to the kitchen table, important decisions are often made in collaboration. But are two—or three or five—heads better than one? Not always, according to new research from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “People who make judgments by working with someone else are more confident in those judgments. As a result they take less input from other people”—and this myopia wipes out any advantage a pair may have over an individual, says psychologist Julia A. Minson, who conducted the study with Jennifer S. Mueller.
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When My Eyes Serve My Stomach
Our senses aren’t just delivering a strict view of what’s going on in the world; they’re affected by what’s going on in our heads. A new study finds that hungry people see food-related words more clearly than people who’ve just eaten. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this change in vision happens at the earliest, perceptual stages, before higher parts of the brain have a chance to change the messages coming from the eyes. Psychologists have known for decades that what’s going on inside our head affects our senses.
