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New Research From Psychological Science
On the Strength of Connections Between Localist Mental Modules as a Source of Frequency-of-Occurrence Effects Derek Besner, Sarah Moroz, and Shannon O’Malley How do people become familiar with items and events that appear frequently in their lives? To test potential mechanisms, the reaction times to numerical stimuli presented in either Arabic numerals (the more frequent form in which numbers are presented) or words (less frequent) were compared in different tasks. There was a difference in the reaction times between the two formats for a parity judgment task (in which participants indicated whether a number was odd or even) but not for a test in which participants read each stimulus aloud.
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Does Belief in Free Will Lead to Action?
Free will may be an illusion. Yet we persist in believing we are the masters of our fates—and that belief affects how we act. Think you determine the course of your life and you’re likely to work harder toward your goals and feel better about yourself too. Think you don’t, and you’re likelier to behave in ways that fulfill that prophesy. “Folk psychology tells us if you feel in control, you perform better,” says Davide Rigoni, an experimental psychologist now at the University of Marseille.
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Think You’ll Ace That Test? Think Again. Then Start Studying
How we feel when encountering information that we’re trying to learn biases our ability to predict what we’ll remember.
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Chicken Soup for the Soul: Comfort Food Fights Loneliness
People who were generally secure in their relationships were able to mitigate feelings of loneliness by writing about a comfort food.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Independent Allocation of Attention to Eye and Hand Targets in Coordinated Eye-Hand Movements Donatas Jonikatis and Heiner Deubel When a person reaches for an object, he or she will often look where they reach. But which requires more attention, the hand or the eye movements? Researchers conducted a series of experiments in which participants made simultaneous hand and eye movements to separate locations. The participants were able to allocate their attention equally to both locations, which suggests that even though hand and eye movements are connected, attention limits do not constrain the selection of targets for hand and eye movements.
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Are the Wealthiest Countries the Smartest Countries?
It's not just how free the market is. Some economists are looking at another factor that determines how much a country's economy flourishes: how smart its people are. For a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers analyzed test scores from 90 countries and found that the intelligence of the people, particularly the smartest 5 percent, made a big contribution to the strength of their economies. In the last 50 years or so, economists have started taking an interest in the value of human capital. That means all of the qualities of the people who make up the workforce.
