New Content From Current Directions in Psychological Science

Navigating Through the Experienced Environment: Insights From Mobile Eye Tracking
Koraly Pérez-Edgar, Leigha A. MacNeill, and Xiaoxue Fu

Mobile eye-tracking (MET) devices allow researchers to capture eye movements and gaze while individuals engage in social interactions and navigate their environment. With MET, gaze patterns are recorded through head- or eyeglass-mounted cameras pointed at the wearer’s eye. These gaze patterns are then superimposed onto a separate camera that captures the visual field. This allows the researchers to observe the world from the point of view of the individual in action. Pérez-Edgar and colleagues review the methods and uses of MET and illustrate how this technique can be used to study social, behavioral, and cognitive processes in real-world environments.

A Value-Based Framework for Understanding Cooperation
Philip Pärnamets, Anastasia Shuster, Diego A. Reinero, and Jay J. Van Bavel

Pärnamets and colleagues integrated neuroeconomic models of decision making with the psychological variables involved in cooperation to create a unifying value-based framework for understanding cooperation. They propose that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex serves as a neural integration hub that receives inputs from attention, memory, and learning and computes the value of cooperative decisions. Pärnamets and colleagues also describe findings from research on contexts and norms, identity, and intergroup relations that highlight the factors that shape the value of cooperation. This value-based framework accommodates previous findings and offers novel predictions about cooperation.

Who Comes to Mind? Dynamic Construction of Social Networks
Joseph B. Bayer, Neil A. Lewis, Jr., and Jonathan L. Stahl

Bayer and colleagues describe real-time construction of cognitive social networks as a process that allows explaining who comes to our minds. They describe the types of relational structures that constitute momentary social networks, including personal relationships, social groups, and mental sets. They also address the cognitive mechanisms that determine which individuals get activated in these networks. The researchers propose next steps for understanding social-network cognition in real-world contexts and discuss implications for social resources and intergroup disparities.

Idiographic Traits: A Return to Allportian Approaches to Personality
Emorie D. Beck and Joshua J. Jackson

Recent measurement and modeling techniques allow researchers to examine the within-person organization of personality. In this idiographic approach to personality, also proposed by Allport (1968), people are considered in relation to themselves rather than in relation to a generalized organization of personality (i.e., a nomothetic approach). Beck and Jackson review findings suggesting that people have unique structures of personality and that these structures change depending on situations people encounter. However, these dynamic personality structures also show some consistency among some people.

Learning to Read and Dyslexia: From Theory to Intervention Through Personalized Computational Models
Johannes C. Ziegler, Conrad Perry, and Marco Zorzi

Ziegler and colleagues summarize what we know about learning to read and propose a computational model of reading acquisition. This model can be used to understand the normal development of reading acquisition and the impaired reading development that occurs in dyslexia. The authors show how to simulate individual learning trajectories and possible intervention outcomes, depending on different reading skills, including orthography, phonology, and vocabulary.