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Why C is not G: How We Identify Letters
The next time you are reading a book, or even as you read this article, consider the words that you are seeing. How do you recognize these words? Substantial research has shown that while reading, we recognize words by their letters and not by the general shape of the word. However, it was largely unknown how we differentiate one letter from another. Psychologist Daniel Fiset from the University of Victoria and his colleagues investigated which features of letters are necessary for their identification. In these experiments, the researchers used the “Bubbles” technique, in which randomly sampled areas of a letter were shown to volunteers.
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Creative Differences: Diversity Enhances Creative Performance
When asked to describe ourselves, we usually do not answer with a list of our physical traits, rather, we tend to mention which groups we identify with. These groups (or social identities) may include a particular ethnic group, religious affiliation, or a sport we participate in. There are times when we identify with one of our social identities more so than others. Previous research has suggested that creative ideas result from a blending of existing knowledge sets which initially appeared to be completely unrelated to one another.
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If it’s Hard to Read, it’s Hard to Do: Study Shows Difficult to Read Instructions Decrease Motivation
It is not surprising that people are more willing to participate in a task if it does not require too much effort. What is interesting, however, is the way we determine just how easy a task will be and therefore, how motivated we are to complete it. New research from University of Michigan psychologists Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz investigates how thinking about a task (i.e., how complex or simple it will be) affects our attitude toward the task itself. The researchers tested this by trying to motivate a group of college students to exercise regularly by providing them with directions on how to implement an exercise regimen.
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New Study Explores Social Comparison in Early Childhood
It has been shown (and probably experienced by all of us) that performing worse than our peers on a particular task results in negative self-esteem and poorer subsequent performance on the same task. How people respond when their peers perform better than they do has been studied in a variety of age groups and it turns out that preschoolers have thicker skin than adults do!
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Baby Talk: The Roots of the Early Vocabulary in Infants’ Learning From Speech
Although babies typically start talking around 12 months of age, their brains actually begin processing certain aspects of language much earlier, so that by the time they start talking, babies actually already know hundreds of words. While studying language acquisition in infants can be a challenging endeavor, researchers have begun to make significant progress that changes previous views of what infants learn, according to a new report by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Daniel Swingley.
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It All Adds Up: Early Achievement in Math May Identify Future Scientists and Engineers
New research published in the October issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that there may be a way to identify budding scientists and engineers and thus be able to guide them, from a young age, to careers that will enable them to make the most of their abilities. Vanderbilt University psychologists Gregory Park, David Lubinski and Camilla P. Benbow wanted to see if early mathematical reasoning ability would be predictive of future accomplishments in scientific and technical fields. The researchers identified 1500 young adolescents who had scored in the top 1% on the math portion of the SAT.
