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Thinking of Things Unseen
One of the most distinctive characteristics of humans is probably one you don’t think of very often — the capacity to learn based merely on what someone tells you. Think about it: new information is most often given to us about entities that aren’t present. For instance, if we are told that our neighbors’ son has died his hair purple, we update our mental image of him to accommodate this newly acquired information. What is unknown, however, is when we become capable of revising our mental representations of objects or situations based solely on what someone tells us. To answer this question, Boston University psychologist Patricia Ganea and her colleagues set up a series of experiments.
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Study illuminates human’s unique ability to perceive a scene
What we see and understand about the visual world is tightly tied to where our eyes are pointed. In an article in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, University of Edinburgh psychologist, John Henderson discusses current approaches and new empirical findings that are allowing investigators to unravel how human gaze control operates during active real-world scene perception. Gist theory of psychology explains how humans are able to apprehend the full context of a scene merely be glancing at it.
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Growing In Circles: New Study Examines How Rearing Environment Can Alter Navigation
Many animals, including humans, frequently face the task of getting from one place to another. Although many navigational strategies exist, all vertebrate species readily use geometric cues; things such as walls and corners to determine direction within an enclosed space. Moreover, some species such as rats and human children are so influenced by these geometric cues that they often ignore more reliable features such as a distinctive object or colored wall. This surprising reliance on geometry has led researchers to suggest the existence of a geometric module in the brain.
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Regrettably, Humans Mispredict Their Emotions After Decision Making
Behavioral research over the past 15 years has confirmed what anyone who has purchased a house or dumped a significant other could tell you: When people make decisions, they anticipate that they may regret their choices. It is important that we maintain this ability, because as the aforementioned house-buyers and spouse-dumpers know, regret can be a terrible feeling. How accurate are people in their anticipations of regret – and of other post-decisional emotions, such as disappointment? It is a topic has been rather neglected by scientists, but new research published in the August issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, aims to fill this gap.
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They All Look the Same: Why we are Unable to Distinguish Faces of Other Races (and Sometimes Our Own)
There’s a troubling psychological phenomenon that just about everyone has experienced but few will admit to; having difficulty distinguishing between people of different racial groups. This isn’t merely a nod to the denigrating expression “they all look the same.” Indeed, the “cross-race effect” is one of the most well replicated findings in psychological research and can lead to embarrassment, social castigation, or the disturbingly common occurrence of eye-witness misidentifications.
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Ability to “Tell the Difference” Declines as Infants Age
A new article published in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that infants fine-tune their visual and auditory systems to stimuli during the first year of life, essentially “weeding out” unnecessary discriminatory abilities. Lisa Scott, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and her colleagues examined several studies suggesting that infants begin to hone their perceptual discrimination to environmentally relevant distinctions by 9-12 months of age. At the same time, the discrimination of environmentally irrelevant, or less frequently encountered, distinctions declines.
