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When losing leads to gaining
Chicago Tribune: If you go to a game at U.S. Cellular Field or Wrigley this season, you may wonder why you feel a bit squeezed for space. All those empty seats, and yet, somehow, it feels as though there is less room than there used to be. That guy next to you is crowding a bit into your space. The woman on the other side is spilling over as well. Come to think of it, when did these seats get so darned narrow? Apparently you're not imagining things.
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Cognitive Science Meets Pre-Algebra
The New York Times: The math students at Liberty Middle School were not happy. The seventh graders’ homework was harder and more time-consuming at first, and many of the problems seemed stale. They were old, from weeks or months ago — proportions, again? — and solving them interrupted the flow of the students’ current work. ... “The result is that you feel you’ve learned the material really well; people prefer blocked practice, when you ask them,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But they do much better on later tests when they practiced interleaved, or mixed, sets of problems or skills. It’s completely counterintuitive.” ...
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Anxiety Limits Our Ability to Discriminate Faces and Speech
Anxiety can impair our accuracy on face- and word-recognition tasks, providing another possible source of fallibility in eyewitness testimony, according to research presented in two reports published in Psychological Science. In the first report, participants were asked to breathe through a mask that provided normal air or a mask that provided CO2-enriched air, a reliable method of inducing anxiety. The participants were then asked to discriminate between similar sounding phonemes, or letter sounds. For instance, though the /g/ and /k/ sounds are similar in “gift” and “kift,” people generally hear “gift” because it’s a familiar word.
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Study finds being poor places heavy burden on mental capacity
The Globe and Mail: Poverty is like a tax on the brain, a team of researchers has reported, because it imposes a measurable burden on the mental capacity of those who must struggle with it day after day. The result, part of a study of cognitive reasoning across income groups, may explain why low-income people seem to have a harder time with certain tasks that require focus or planning and appear to make decisions that work against their best interests. It also suggests that policies and programs designed to help the poor improve their lot may not be successful if they do not take into account how much brain power is used simply in the act of trying to get by with scarce resources. ...
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The Perfect Nap: Sleeping Is a Mix of Art and Science
The Wall Street Journal: There's an art to napping. Studies have found different benefits—and detriments—to a nap's timing, duration and even effect on different people, depending on one's age and possibly genetics. "Naps are actually more complicated than we realize," said David Dinges, a sleep scientist at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. "You have to be deliberative about when you're going to nap, how long you're going to nap and if you're trying to use the nap relative to work or what you have coming up." Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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As We Become Richer, Do We Become Stingier?
NPR: Patricia Greenfield has tracked families in Chiapas, Mexico, over four decades. Many were very poor when she started her study. Slowly, over time, they grew wealthier. Along the way, Greenfield noticed something: As the people she followed grew richer, they became more individualistic. Community ties frayed and weakened. Greenfield expanded her findings to form a more general theory about the effects that wealth has on people: "We become more individualistic, less family and community oriented." In a new study, the UCLA researcher makes the argument that the same thing has happened in the U.S. over a longer period.
