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In Future Math Whizzes, Signs of ‘Number Sense’
The New York Times: Children as young as 3 have a “number sense” that may be correlated with mathematical aptitude, according to a new study. Melissa Libertus, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, and colleagues looked at something called “number sense,” an intuition — not involving counting — about the concepts of more and less. It exists in all people, Dr. Libertus said, including infants and indigenous peoples who have had no formal education. The researchers measured this intuition in preschoolers by displaying flashing groups of blue and yellow dots on a computer screen. The children had to estimate which group of dots was larger in number.
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Understanding Mind-Body Influences
Wendy Berry Mendes focuses her research on embodiment -- how the mind and body reciprocally influence each other. Specifically, she looks at how the brain and body experience emotions, stress, and motivation and how physical responses influence behavior and decision-making. Her research looks at a wide range of topics from coping with stigma and discrimination, to the differentiation of “good” and “bad” stress physiology and how they influence decision-making, to mind-body relations across the lifespan.
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Love, money and suspicion
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 film Suspicion is a masterful psychological study of love and money. Cary Grant plays the charming but irresponsible Johnnie Aysgarth, who dazzles the frumpy Lina McLaidlaw, played by Joan Fontaine. Only after their elopement does Lina begin piecing together the truth about her husband: He is broke, a habitual gambler, a liar, an embezzler—and possibly a killer. Indeed, everywhere Lina looks she sees signs that Johnnie is plotting her murder to secure his fortune. What makes this thriller so powerful is that it plays off two of our most potent human impulses.
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Learning from Experience
Daphna Shohamy researches learning, memory and decision making. Specifically, she tries to understand the underlying brain mechanisms of how we learn from experience and how we use what we learn to guide decisions and actions. She adopts an integrative approach that draws broadly on neuroscience to make predictions about cognition. Her research provides a deeper understanding of the cognitive and neural processes involved for different aspects of behavior. In 2011, Shohamy received a Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science (APS). Q&A with Daphna Shohamy
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Decision Making Changes With Age – and Age Helps!
We make decisions all our lives—so you’d think we’d get better and better at it. Yet research has shown that younger adults are better decision makers than older ones. Some Texas psychologists, puzzled by these findings, suspected the experiments were biased toward younger brains. So, rather than testing the ability to make decisions one at a time without regard to past or future, as earlier research did, these psychologists designed a model requiring participants to evaluate each result in order to strategize the next choice, more like decision making in the real world. The results: The older decision makers trounced their juniors.
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Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?
The New York Times: Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one: Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud. Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault. Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud. There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences.
