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Stimulating Integrative Research in Computational Cognition
The National Science Foundation is seeking proposals that will result in “encouraging active dialogue across the cognitive and computational communities, facilitating bidirectional cross-fertilization of ideas, and nurturing emerging areas of transdisciplinary research.” This is not a new program or solicitation. For more information, read the Dear Colleagues Letter on the NSF website.
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Increasing Personal Savings, the Groundhog Day Way
Thinking about time as a cycle of recurring experiences may help us to put more money away into our savings.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Power Anomalies in Testing Mediation David A. Kenny and Charles M. Judd In this article, the authors describe several peculiarities of mediation analysis in which the power for the test of the total effect and the power for the test of the direct effect can be dramatically different than the power for the test of the indirect effect. The authors describe when and why these peculiarities might occur and their implications for interpretation of mediation analyses. "Top-Down" Effects Where None Should Be Found: The El Greco Fallacy in Perception Research Chaz Firestone and Brian J.
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Alcohol Dampens Stress Responses, Especially for Uncertain Threats
Whether it's a glass of wine, a pint of beer, or a tumbler of whiskey, people often turn to alcohol to calm their nerves. Anecdotally, alcohol does seem to help dampen our stress response, but the specifics of how, when, and for whom this stress reduction actually occurs remains unclear. Researchers John Curtin, Daniel Bradford, and Benjamin Shapiro of the University of Wisconsin-Madison wanted to better understand the mechanisms and boundary conditions that contribute to the stress-dampening properties of alcohol. In particular, they wanted to explore how alcohol influences our responses to threats of varying certainty and severity.
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Studies show the long-term, positive effects of fitness on cognitive abilities
The Washington Post: It has long been accepted that exercise cuts the risk of heart disease, and recent studies suggest a raft of more general benefits, such as reducing the risk of certain types of cancer and even preventing the onset of Type 2 diabetes. Now it seems that gym junkies can also expect a boost in brainpower, too. This is not just the vague glow of well-being suggested by sayings such as “a sound mind lives in a healthy body.” John Ratey, a neoropsychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and others are finding that fitness has a long-term influence on a wide range of cognitive abilities.
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Eyes are better at mental snapshots than cameras, study suggests
CNN: I've got hundreds of photos from my recent Europe trip, split between a smartphone and a big camera. A lot are shots of the same thing -- my attempt to get the perfect lighting on a fountain or a cathedral, for example -- so that I'll have these scenes to remember always. So I was interested to read a new study in the journal Psychological Science suggesting that the act of taking photos may actually diminish what we remember about objects being photographed. "People just pull out their cameras," says study author Linda Henkel, researcher in the department of psychology at Fairfield University in Connecticut.
