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Want to Solve a Problem? Don’t Just Use Your Brain, but Your Body Too
When we’ve got a problem to solve, we don't just use our brains but the rest of our bodies, too. The connection, as neurologists know, is not uni-directional. Now there’s evidence from cognitive psychology of the same fact. “Being able to use your body in problem solving alters the way you solve the problems,” says University of Wisconsin psychology professor Martha Alibali. “Body movements are one of the resources we bring to cognitive processes.” These conclusions, of a new study by Alibali and colleagues—Robert C.
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New Research From Psychological Science
One to Four, and Nothing More: Nonconscious Parallel Individuation of Objects During Action Planning Jason P. Gallivan, Craig S. Chapman, Daniel K. Wood, Jennifer L. Milne, Daniel Ansari, Jody C. Culham, and Melvyn A. Goodale Processing sensory information about multiple objects at once is limited, but is there a processing limit when someone is planning to do something with the objects (action planning)? Participants were asked to touch targets on a computer screen within a certain period of time. The number of targets that appeared, as well as their distance from the center of the screen, varied.
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Does Our Personality Affect Our Level of Attractiveness?
Part of what determines how much success you will have in the dating world is whether you have a good sense of whether people find you attractive. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that certain personality traits contribute to being a good judge of whether someone else thinks you’re worth meeting again. The study is one of a series to come out of a big speed-dating experiment held in Berlin about five years ago.
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Thoughts That Win
Using self-talk — repeating specific words or small phrases — can focus players’ attention and improve their performance.
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Your Culture May Influence Your Perception of Death
Contemplating mortality can be terrifying. But not everyone responds to that terror in the same way. Now, a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds cultural differences in how people respond to mortality. European-Americans get worried and try to protect their sense of self, while Asian-Americans are more likely to reach out to others. Much of the research on what psychologists call “mortality salience” – thinking about death – has been done on people of European descent, and has found that it makes people act in dramatic ways.
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Eggs, Butter, Milk – Memory Is Not Just A Shopping List!
Often, the goal of science is to show that things are not what they seem to be. But now, in an article which will be published in an upcoming issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, a veteran cognitive psychologist exhorts his colleagues in memory research to consult the truth of their own experience. “Cognitive psychologists are trying to be like physicists and chemists, which means doing controlled laboratory experiments, getting numbers out of them and explaining the numbers,” says Douglas L.
