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Today in Research: Memory Loss in Combat
The Atlantic: That's a single minute. Or, in other words, a very short amount of time. Think of all the many minutes soldiers or police officers spend using "physical exertion in a threatening situation," as the study defines combat. Now think of all the lost memories. Looking at a group of police officers, researchers determined the effects of these situations on their brains. "As exhaustion takes over, cognitive resources tend to diminish. The ability to fully shift attention is inhibited, so even potentially relevant information might not be attended to. Ultimately, memory is determined by what we can process and attend to," explained Dr. Lorraine Hope. Read the whole story: The Atlantic
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Throwing Light on the Dark Side
Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there may be someone who has not heard of “the dark side.” But I think that’s unlikely. Whether you are a Star Wars aficionado or not, there is no doubt that these hugely popular movies have saturated the culture and the common vocabulary. As Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi explained to the innocent young Luke Skywalker in the original 1977 film, the once virtuous Darth Vader was seduced by the dark side of the Force, his destructive power fueled by rage and hate. The dark side is all the galaxy’s evils rolled together. Of course, Star Wars creator George Lucas did not invent the metaphor of the dark side. Not even remotely.
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Checking Off Symptoms Online Affects Our Perceptions of Risk
You’ve been feeling under the weather. You Google your symptoms. A half-hour later, you’re convinced it’s nothing serious—or afraid you have cancer. More than 60 percent of Americans get their health information online, and a
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Police officers at risk of memory loss after physical exertion
Metro News: Just 60 seconds of adrenaline-pumping activity can 'seriously damage' their recollection of the event, according to UK scientists. They say forgetfulness is often triggered by high-energy events like chasing a suspect. Lorraine Hope, from the University of Portsmouth, believes her findings, published in journal Psychological Science, flag up the potential problems with witness statements. She said: 'Police officers are often expected to remember in detail who said what and how many blows were received or given in the midst of physical struggle or shortly afterwards.
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Visual illusions may help boost sports performance
Yahoo! India: One of the ways in which a player might be able to improve his chances at making a free throw during a basketball tournament could be by tricking himself into thinking that the basket is bigger than it really is, a new study has suggested. Purdue University's psychological scientist Jessi Witt, who has played sports her whole life, started studying how perception relates to sports performance in graduate school. "You hear about athletes making these comments like, oh, I was playing so well, everything seemed like it was moving in slow motion," she said. Much of her research has examined this effect-how people who are doing well at a sport seem to see the world differently.
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The Bad Science Reporting Effect
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The press coverage of the so-called “QWERTY effect” in early March left me somewhat worried that it is so easy to publish bad science, but absolutely appalled at the state of science reporting. The alleged effect is that average scores on reported positivity or happiness associations are slightly higher for words having more letters from the right-hand side of the keyboard. By late on March 8, Mark Liberman at Language Log had re-examined the relevant statistics, noting that the effect is extremely weak. It could explain about a 10th of one percent of the variance in positive vs. negative affective judgments about words, if it existed.
