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Decision Making Changes With Age – and Age Helps!
We make decisions all our lives—so you’d think we’d get better and better at it. Yet research has shown that younger adults are better decision makers than older ones. Some Texas psychologists, puzzled by these findings, suspected the experiments were biased toward younger brains. So, rather than testing the ability to make decisions one at a time without regard to past or future, as earlier research did, these psychologists designed a model requiring participants to evaluate each result in order to strategize the next choice, more like decision making in the real world. The results: The older decision makers trounced their juniors.
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Speaking and Understanding Speech Share the Same Parts of the Brain
The brain has two big tasks related to speech: making it and understanding it. Psychologists and others who study the brain have debated whether these are really two separate tasks or whether they both use the same regions of the brain. Now, a new study, published in the August issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that speaking and understanding speech share the same parts of the brain, with one difference: we don’t need the brain regions that control the movements of lips, teeth, and so on to understand speech. Most studies of how speech works in the brain focuses on comprehension.
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Psychologists Interrupt the Miserable Cycle of Social Insecurity
Tom likes Susan but he fears she does not like him. Expecting to be rejected, he’s cold toward Susan. And guess what? She snubs him back. His prophesy is self-fulfilled, his social insecurity reinforced. The miserable cycle continues. But what if Tom could be helped to set aside his fears and behave as warmly as he feels? Happily, he can, says University of Victoria psychologist Danu Anthony Stinson.
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Social Acceptance and Rejection: The Sweet and the Bitter
Psychology researchers have long been interested in close relationships, but have only more recently begun investigating social exclusion.
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How The Visual System Constructs Moving Objects: One by One
Although our eyes record the word as millions of pixels, “the visual system is fantastic at giving us a world that looks like objects, not pixels,” says Northwestern University psychologist Steven L. Franconeri. It does this by grouping areas of the world with similar characteristics, such as color, shape, or motion. The process is so seamless that we feel we’re taking it all in simultaneously. But this, says a new study by Franconeri and his colleague Brian R. Levinthal, is “an illusion.” Instead, they say, that for some types of grouping, the visual system is limited by its ability to perceive only one group at a time.
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Spoiler Alert: Stories Are Not Spoiled by ‘Spoilers’
Many of us go to extraordinary lengths to avoid learning the endings of stories we have yet to read or see – plugging our ears, for example, and loudly repeating “la-la-la-la,” when discussion threatens to reveal the outcome. Of book and movie critics, we demand they not give away any plot twists or, at least, oblige with a clearly labeled “spoiler alert.” We get angry with friends who slip up and spill a fictional secret. But we’re wrong and wasting our time, suggests a new experimental study from the University of California, San Diego. People who flip to the last page of a book before starting it have the better intuition. Spoilers don’t spoil stories.
