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Teaching The Neurons To Meditate
Studies show that Buddhist monks, who have spent thousands of hours of meditating, have distinct patterns of brain activity. But findings suggest brain activity could change after just a short period of practice.
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Chicks Dig Certain Types of Music
Newly hatched chicks appear to prefer certain sounds over others, just like human infants, suggesting that this musical preference may be innate.
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Ironic Effects of Anti-Prejudice Messages
Organizations and programs have been set up all over the globe in the hopes of urging people to end prejudice. According to a research article, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, such programs may actually increase prejudices. Lisa Legault, Jennifer Gutsell and Michael Inzlicht, from the University of Toronto Scarborough, were interested in exploring how one’s everyday environment influences people’s motivation toward prejudice reduction.
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Up, Down, Right, Left – How Visual Cues Help Us Understand Bodily Motion
“Our visual system is tuned towards perceiving other people. We spend so much time doing that—seeing who they are, what they are doing, what they intend to do,” says psychology professor Nikolaus F. Troje of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. This process is called biological motion perception, and humans are so good at it that even a few dots on a screen representing the major joints of a body are enough to retrieve all the information we need—as long as they move. But what role does motion play in that process? Does the visual system use it only to connect the dots to create a coherent, or “global,” structure? Troje and his colleagues—Masahiro Hirai and Daniel R.
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Distract Yourself or Think It Over? Two Ways to Deal with Negative Emotions
A big part of coping with life is having a flexible reaction to the ups and downs. Now, a study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people choose to respond differently depending on how intense an emotion is. When confronted with high-intensity negative emotions, they tend to choose to turn their attention away, but with something lower-intensity, they tend to think it over and neutralize the feeling that way. Emotions are useful—for example, fear tells your body to get ready to escape or fight in a dangerous situation.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Magnocellular and Parvocellular Contributions to Conscious and Nonconscious Vision Evelina Tapia and Bruno G. Breitmeyer When it comes to consciousness and vision, the magnocellular (M) channel in the dorsal cortical pathway has been associated with nonconscious visual processing, and the parvocellular (P) channel in the ventral cortical pathway has been connected to conscious visual processing. In this study, researchers used contrast-dependent primes to determine whether the priming effects were characteristic of M- or P-channel responses. They found that M channels have a significant role in conscious vision and propose a new mechanism for how the channels function.
