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Imagination Beats Practice in Boosting Visual Search Performance
Practice may not make perfect, but visualization might. New research shows that people who imagined a visual target before having to pick it out of a group of distracting items were faster at finding the target than those who did an actual practice run beforehand. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Not So Innocent: Toddlers' Inferences About Costs and Culpability Julian Jara-Ettinger, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, and Laura E. Schulz How do perceptions of competence and motivation influence children's social evaluations of others? Children watched two puppets push a button on a toy. When the button was pushed, the toy played music. One puppet correctly pushed the button on the first try; the other puppet correctly pushed the button only after several unsuccessful attempts. When asked, both puppets refused to help the child's accompanying parent push the button.
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Children Exposed to Multiple Languages May Be Better Natural Communicators
Young children who hear more than one language spoken at home become better communicators, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Researchers discovered that children from multilingual environments are better at interpreting a speaker’s meaning than children who are exposed only to their native tongue. The most novel finding is that the children do not even have to be bilingual themselves; it is the exposure to more than one language that is the key for building effective social communication skills.
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Self-Promoters Tend to Misjudge How Annoying They Are to Others
Bragging to coworkers about a recent promotion, or posting a photo of your brand new car on Facebook, may seem like harmless ways to share good news. But new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that self-promotion or a “humblebrag” often backfires. Researchers Irene Scopelliti, George Loewenstein, and Joachim Vosgerau wanted to find out why so many people frequently get the trade-off between self-promotion and modesty wrong. They found that self-promoters overestimate how much their self-promotion elicits positive emotions and underestimate how much it elicits negative emotions.
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Narrow Misses Can Propel Us Toward Other Rewards and Goals
Whether it’s being outbid at the last second in an online auction or missing the winning lottery number by one digit, we often come so close to something we can “almost taste it” only to lose out in the end. These “near wins” may actually boost our motivation to achieve other wins, leading us to pursue totally unrelated rewards, according to new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our research suggests that at least in some cases, losing has positive power.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Is Playing Video Games Related to Cognitive Abilities? Nash Unsworth, Thomas S. Redick, Brittany D. McMillan, David Z. Hambrick, Michael J. Kane, and Randall W. Engle Although many recent studies have indicated that playing video games may enhance various cognitive abilities, other studies have failed to replicate these findings. The authors suggest that this discrepancy may be a result of methodological issues such as small sample sizes and extreme-groups designs. The authors reanalyzed two large sets of data on participants' video-game playing in relation to their performance on a variety of cognitive-ability assessments.
