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When The Brain Decides
Every day we have to make decisions that involve evaluating or choosing between options, often without much information to go on. So how we do it? How do we prevent analysis paralysis? Psychological theory suggests that we often rely on the recognition heuristic, choosing the option that we recognize over the one we don’t. So, as psychological scientist Christian Frings points out, if we have to predict whether Roger Federer or Michael Berrer will win a tennis match, we’ll probably stick with Federer because he’s a well-known name.
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Pursuing Non-Conscious Goals
You’re at dinner with your date’s family and you’re already feeling slightly nervous, anxious and wondering what type of an impression you will make. All of a sudden, your date’s little nephew comes running up to you and hands you bits of food from his mouth. How disgusted would you feel? In a new article to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, authors Ran Hassin and Daniella Shidlovski from The Hebrew University suggest that if you subconsciously want to impress the family, and taking the food would help you do so, you will be less disgusted than if you didn’t have such non-conscious motivation.
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Our Brains Have Multiple Mechanisms For Learning
One of the most important things humans do is learning this kind of pattern: when A happens, B follows. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines how people learn, and finds that they use different mental processes in different situations. “There's a long history in the field of psychology of two different approaches to thinking about how we learn,” says James McClelland of Stanford University, who cowrote the paper with graduate student Daniel Sternberg. One is learning by association; Pavlov's dog learned to associate food with the sound of a bell.
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Goalies Tend to Dive Right in World Cup Penalty Shoot-Outs When Their Team is Behind…Why?
In World Cup penalty shoot-outs, goalies tend to dive right when their team is behind and they have a chance to save the game for their country, according to a study.
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Even Before Language, Babies Learn The World Through Sounds
It’s not just the words, but the sounds of words that have meaning for us. This is true for children and adults, who can associate the strictly auditory parts of language— vowels produced in the front or the back of the mouth, high or low pitch—with blunt or pointy things, large or small things, fast-moving or long-staying things. Do the same principles apply for young infants, and not just to things, but also to abstractions? A new study by Marcela Peña, Jacques Mehler, and Marina Nespor, working together at the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy and Catholic University of Chile, says yes.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A Functional Role for the Motor System in Language Understanding: Evidence From Theta-Burst Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Roel M. Willems, Ludovica Labruna, Mark D’Esposito, Richard Ivry, and Daniel Casasanto Previous studies have revealed that motor areas of the brain can be activated when people read or listen to action words. To determine whether motor areas are necessary for language comprehension, researchers used theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation to stimulate an area in either the left or the right premotor cortex.
