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Daniel M. Oppenheimer
http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/ What does your research focus on? I dance around a lot of different research areas, but most of them are somehow connected to metacognition, judgment and decision making. How does what we think we know, (and how we think we think) influence the way we make decisions? What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? I wish I had better metacognition about what draws me to these sorts of projects. Really, I just do whatever projects grab my attention. At any given moment, there rarely seems to be any connection between the different projects I’m working on. But when I look back in hindsight there do seem to be common themes.
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Julie Bugg
Washington University, USA What does your research focus on? The primary focus of my research is cognitive control, and age-related changes in control. I am interested in the mechanisms humans use to resolve interference, the interplay of expectancy-driven and stimulus-driven control, the degree to which these mechanisms are impaired versus spared with age, and remediation of age-related cognitive control decline. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? I became interested in cognitive control and the intersection of aging and control during graduate school while reading Hasher and Zacks’ classic work.
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Shana K. Carpenter
Iowa State University, USA http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/~shacarp What does your research focus on? I study techniques and strategies that improve memory. My research so far has focused on the effectiveness of relatively simple mnemonic techniques such as retrieval practice, the optimal scheduling of repeated study sessions, and the best time during which corrective feedback should be given in order to maximize the amount of information that people can remember. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? It was purely by accident that I became fascinated with learning. When I was younger, I didn’t enjoy school at all.
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Nordwärts!
bild der wissenschaft: Die interne Landkarte des Hirns ist nach Norden ausgerichtet Deutsche Forscher sind dem System auf die Spur gekommen, wie das Gehirn die räumliche Struktur einer vertrauten Umgebung verarbeitet: Offenbar ist der Anhaltspunkt für die Orientierung der Norden – es ist also, als ob wir eine imaginäre Landkarte vor Augen hätten. Die Wissenschaftler um Julia Frankenstein vom Max-Planck-Institut für biologische Kybernetik in Tübingen führten ihre Experimente mit 26 Einwohnern der Stadt Tübingen durch. Die ortskundigen Probanden wurden mit einem fotorealistischen virtuellen Modell ihrer Heimatstadt konfrontiert.
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Simine Vazire
Washington University in St. Louis www.simine.com What does your research focus on? My research examines people's knowledge about their own personalities. Do people know how they behave? Do they know how others see them? I examine the discrepancies between how people see themselves and how others see them, and try to determine who is more accurate. I also examine whether people are aware of these discrepancies, and if so, how do they justify them? Finally, I'm curious about the processes that lead to these discrepancies - why do others sometimes know us better than we know ourselves? What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you?
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Study of the Day: Want to Improve a Woman’s Driving Skills? Flatter Her
The Atlantic: PROBLEM: Previous studies -- and far too many sexist jokes -- have discussed how women are not as skilled as men when it comes to tasks like parking and map-reading that require spatial awareness. University of Warwick psychologist Zachary Estes decided to find out if confidence could account for this gender difference. METHODOLOGY: Together with University of Georgia Health Center's Sydney Felker, Estes recruited 545 students for four experiments involving a 3-D mental rotation task that measures a person's spatial skills.
