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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Shaping Attention With Reward: Effects of Reward on Space- and Object-Based Selection Sarah Shomstein and Jacoba Johnson The effect of rewards on conscious choice has been extensively researched, but the effect of reward on automatic processes is still not well understood. To investigate the effect of reward on automatic processes, the researchers investigated whether rewards would affect performance on a space- and object-based selective-attention task. The presence of a reward (money or points) altered participants' responses during the task.
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APA Division 1 Call for Nominations for Awards for Year 2014
Deadline: February 15, 2014 The Society for General Psychology, Division One of the American Psychological Association is conducting its Year 2014 awards competition, including the William James Book Award for a recent book that serves to integrate material across psychological subfields or to provide coherence to the diverse subject matter of psychology, the Ernest R. Hilgard Award for a Lifetime Career Contribution to General Psychology, the George A. Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article on General Psychology, and the Arthur W. Staats Lecture for Unifying Psychology, which is an American Psychological Foundation Award managed by the Society for General Psychology.
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Secret to helping brain age well? Painting and other mental challenges
The Boston Globe: I recently took a painting class with friends during which I learned that my lack of brush-stroke skills compounded my dearth of innate visual talents. Clearly, I’m the weakest link among my more artistic friends, which has made me hesitant to take more classes. But I’m rethinking my decision after hearing about a new study, which found that those who truly challenge themselves by learning novel skills get the biggest memory boost as they age. In other words, the instructors who painted such wonderful copies of a Van Gogh still-life likely weren’t working out their brains as hard as I was because painting—with all their practice and training—comes easy for them.
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Why Are Kids Who Get Less Candy Happier On Halloween?
NPR: What makes trick-or-treaters happy is candy. And more candy is better, right? Well, it turns out that might not actually be the case. A few years ago researchers did on Halloween night where some trick-or-treaters were given a candy bar, and others were given the candy bar and a piece of bubble gum. Now, in any rational universe, you would imagine that the kids who got the candy bar and the bubble gum would be happier than the kids who got just the candy bar. George Wolford, a psychologist at Dartmouth College, and his fellow researchers, Amy Doe and Alexander Rupert, found something quite different.
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Nalini Ambady, Psychologist of Intuition, Is Dead at 54
The New York Times: Nalini Ambady, a social psychologist whose research on the surprising accuracy of first impressions was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in “Blink,” his best-selling nonfiction book of 2005, died on Oct. 28 in Boston. She was 54. Her death, from leukemia, was announced by Stanford University, where she had taught since 2011. In “Blink,” subtitled “The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,” Mr. Gladwell explored the psychology of intuition, snap judgments and gut reactions. The book prominently features Professor Ambady’s work, which centered on the cognitive processes underpinning intuition.
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“Ce l’ho sulla punta della lingua”: è un primo segnale di demenza in arrivo? (“Tip-of-the-Tongue” moments a sign of aging?)
La Stampa: A tutti sarà capitato almeno una volta di avere “sulla punta della lingua” quel termine, quel nome… quella cosa insomma che, proprio adesso, non ci sovviene. Ma, a parte il disagio che questi episodi possono provocare, potrebbero essere un primo segnale che stiamo perdendo la memoria? Che possiamo essere vittime della temuta demenza? A cercare di comprendere se queste défaillance nella memoria sono normali o il segnale di qualcosa di patologico sottostante o in fase di insorgenza è uno studio condotto dai ricercatori dell’Università della Virginia pubblicato sulla rivista Psychological Science, una rivista della Association for Psychological Science (APS).
