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¿Se es mas sabio con la edad? (Are we wiser with age?)
ABC España: Todos recordamos la serie Kung Fu, con el anciano e inteligente maestro chino dando consejos a su «pequeño saltamontes». Hace dos años, Igor Grossmann, de la Universidad de Waterloo (Canadá), se preguntó si realmente era así, si con la edad uno se hace más sabio. Grossman realizó una investigación en los Estados Unidos y llegó a la conclusión de que los norteamericanos de edad avanzada eran más listos que los más jóvenes. Ahora, sin embargo, ha realizado un experimento parecido en Japón y ha llegado al resultado de que los «pequeños saltamontes» amarillos son tan avispados como sus mayores prácticamente desde el principio.
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New Directions in Brain Training: Effectiveness, Methodology, and Application of Cognitive Interventions
Workshop Announcement: "New directions in brain training - Effectiveness, methodology, and application of cognitive interventions" Berlin, Germany October 11-13, 2012 The aim of this workshop is to bring together experts and young scientists from different fields of psychology and neuroscience to establish, discuss and systematize the state of the art in the field. The workshop will focus on cognitive training and transfer effects of different interventions from cognitive, developmental, clinical, and neuropsychological perspectives.
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A More Inclusive Look at Singleness
Past research has found that single individuals are perceived more negatively than couples. However, in previous research on this topic, study participants have always rated targets who were presumably heterosexual because the target’s sexual orientation was not explicitly mentioned. In a recent study, APS Student Caucus Rise Award winner Gal Slonim and colleagues manipulated the sexual orientation of the targets to better understand whether the stigma associated with being single affects both heterosexual and homosexual targets in a similar manner.
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How Knowing a Foreign Language Can Improve Your Decisions
Scientific American: Researchers have sought to understand the range and limits of these emotional language effects. Lower proficiency and/or late acquisition of the foreign language seems to be a crucial constraint. For people who grew up bilingual, skin conductance responses and self-reports were similar when listening to emotional phrases in either language. One method for finding new types of emotional-language effects is to examine areas where cognitive neuroscience reports that people can switch between analytical processing and emotional processing. Gut, automatic or instinctive reasoning is grounded in an emotional good-bad response.
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Just staring into space? Perhaps not – daydreaming helps children concentrate, and makes them perform better in tests
Daily Mail: Daydreaming could help children oncentrate - and even perform better in tests, researchers claim. The children also feel less anxious and more motivated to perform, according to a review of studies on the value of time to reflect. Education should focus more on giving children time to think, claim researchers at the University of Southern California. A study found that introspection - time to reflect - may be harder and harder to come by but can also be an increasingly valuable part of life. Researchers from the University of Southern California studied literature from neuroscience and psychological science to explore what it meant to our brains to be 'at rest'.
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Time flows uphill for remote Papua New Guinea tribe
New Scientist: "HERE and now", "Back in the 1950s", "Going forward"... Western languages are full of spatial metaphors for time, and whether you are, say, British, French or German, you no doubt think of the past as behind you and the future as stretching out ahead. Time is a straight line that runs through your body. Once thought to be universal, this "embodied cognition of time" is in fact strictly cultural. Over the past decade, encounters with various remote tribal societies have revealed a rich diversity of the ways in which humans relate to time (see "Attitudes across the latitudes"). The latest, coming from the Yupno people of Papua New Guinea, is perhaps the most remarkable.
