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Imagination Can Influence Perception
Imagining something with our mind’s eye is a task we engage in frequently, whether we’re daydreaming, conjuring up the face of a childhood friend, or trying to figure out exactly where we might have parked the car. But how can we tell whether our own mental images are accurate or vivid when we have no direct comparison? That is, how do we come to know and judge the contents of our own minds? Mental imagery is typically thought to be a private phenomenon, which makes it difficult to test people’s metacognition of – or knowledge about –their own mental imagery.
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Testing Improves Memory
“We’ve known for over 100 years that testing is good for memory,” says Kent State University psychology graduate student Kalif Vaughn. Psychologists have proven in a myriad of experiments that “retrieval practice”—correctly producing a studied item—increases the likelihood that you’ll get it right the next time. “But we didn’t know why.” In the past, many researchers have believed that testing is good for memory, but only for the exact thing you are trying to remember: so-called “target memory.” If you’re asked to recall the Lithuanian equivalent of an English word, say, you will get good at remembering the Lithuanian, but you won’t necessarily remember the English.
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Chinese-English Speakers Translate English into Chinese Automatically
Over half the world’s population speaks more than one language. But it’s not clear how these languages interact in the brain. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that Chinese people who are fluent in English translate English words into Chinese automatically and quickly, without thinking about it. Like her research subjects, Taoli Zhang of the University of Nottingham is originally from China, but she lives in the UK and is fluent in English. She co wrote the new paper with her colleagues, Walter J.B. van Heuven and Kathy Conklin.
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The Surprising Connection between Two Types of Perception
The brain is constantly changing as it perceives the outside world, processing and learning about everything it encounters. In a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, scientists find a surprising connection between two types of perception: If you’re looking at a group of objects and getting a general sense of them, it’s difficult for your brain to learn relationships between the objects. It’s not known how these two ways of perceiving are related, says Nicholas Turk-Browne, an Assistant Professor at Princeton University.
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Income Disparity Makes People Unhappy
Many economists and sociologists have warned of the social dangers of a wide gap between the richest and everyone else. Now, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, adds a psychological reason to narrow the disparity - it makes people unhappy. Over the last 40 years, “we’ve seen that people seem to be happier when there is more equality,” says University of Virginia psychologist Shigehiro Oishi, who conducted the study with Virginia colleague Selin Kesebir and Ed Diener of the University of Illinois. “Income disparity has grown a lot in the U.S., especially since the 1980s.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Do 18-Month-Olds Really Attribute Mental States to Others? A Critical Test Atsushi Senju, Victoria Southgate, Charlotte Snape, Mark Leonard, and Gergely Csibra Studies have suggested that infants can attribute beliefs to other people. In an independent test of this hypothesis, infants were blindfolded with an opaque blindfold (opaque condition) or a transparent blindfold that appeared opaque (trick condition). Then both groups watched a video of an actor wearing a blindfold while a puppet (the white bear) removed a toy from a box.
