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The Psychology of Déjà vu
All of us have experienced being in a new place and feeling certain that we have been there before. This mysterious feeling, commonly known as déjà vu, occurs when we feel that a new situation is familiar, even if there is evidence that the situation could not have occurred previously. For a long time, this eerie sensation has been attributed to everything from paranormal disturbances to neurological disorders. However, in recent years, as more scientists began studying this phenomenon, a number of theories about déjà vu have emerged, suggesting that it is not merely a glitch in our brain’s memory system. A new report by Colorado State University psychologist Anne M.
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Bound by Attention: Bringing Rats and Humans Together
When picking through a basket of fruit, it doesn’t seem very difficult to recognize a green pear from a green apple. This is easy, thanks to “feature binding” – a process by which our brain combines all of the specific features of an object and gives us a complete and unified picture of it. For example, upon first seeing the fruit basket, our brain immediately gets to work, connecting (or binding) information about each fruit’s shape to its color to ensure that we select the green apple we are craving instead of a green pear. However, if our brain gets distracted, our ability for feature binding is reduced and we may inadvertently end up biting into the green pear instead.
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Is Empty Nest Best? Changes in Marital Satisfaction in Late Middle Age
The phrase “empty nest” can conjure up images of sad and lonely parents sitting at home, twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their children to call or visit. However, a new study, reported in the November issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that an empty nest may have beneficial effects on the parents’ marriage. University of California, Berkeley psychologists Sara M. Gorchoff, Oliver P. John and Ravenna Helson tracked the marital satisfaction of a group of women over 18 years, from the time they were in their 40s to when they were in their early 60s.
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How our Senses Combine to Give us a Better View of the World
From a young age we are taught about the five senses and how they help us to explore our world. Although each sense seems to be its own entity, recent studies have indicated that there is actually a lot of overlap and blending of the senses occurring in the brain to help us better perceive our environment. Researchers J.E. Lugo, R. Doti and Jocelyn Flaubert from the University of Montreal, along with Walter Wittich from McGill University, wanted to know if a feeling from an electrical stimulation of a body part (such as the leg) which normally would not be perceived, would be felt if it was simultaneously accompanied by a visual or auditory signal.
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Study Reveals Clues to How We Forget Over Short-Term
Even though forgetting is such a common occurrence, scientists have not reached a consensus as to how it happens. One theory is that information simply decays from our memory—we forget things because too much time has passed. Another idea states is that forgetfulness occurs when we confuse an item with other items that we have previously encountered (also known as temporal confusability). Psychologists Nash Unsworth from the University of Georgia, Richard P. Heitz from Vanderbilt University and Nathan A. Parks from the Georgia Institute of Technology investigated the two theories to pinpoint the main cause of forgetfulness over the short term.
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Why C is not G: How We Identify Letters
The next time you are reading a book, or even as you read this article, consider the words that you are seeing. How do you recognize these words? Substantial research has shown that while reading, we recognize words by their letters and not by the general shape of the word. However, it was largely unknown how we differentiate one letter from another. Psychologist Daniel Fiset from the University of Victoria and his colleagues investigated which features of letters are necessary for their identification. In these experiments, the researchers used the “Bubbles” technique, in which randomly sampled areas of a letter were shown to volunteers.
