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Playing With Puzzles and Blocks Could Build Children’s Spatial Skills
Play may seem like fun and games, but new research shows that specific kinds of play are actually associated with development of particular cognitive skills. Data from a nationally representative study show that children who play frequently with puzzles, blocks, and board games tend to have better spatial reasoning ability. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our findings show that spatial play specifically is related to children's spatial reasoning skills,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Jamie Jirout of Rhodes College.
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Seeing Themselves as Overweight May Be Self-Fulfilling Prophecy for Some Teens
Teens who mistakenly perceive themselves as overweight are actually at greater risk of obesity as adults, according to research.
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Mothers’ “Baby Talk” Is Less Clear Than Their Adult Speech
People tend to have a distinctive way of talking to babies and small children: We speak more slowly, using a sing-song voice, and tend to use cutesy words like “tummy”. While we might be inclined to think that this kind of “baby talk” is easier for children to understand, new research findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that mothers may actually speak less clearly to their infants than they do to adults.
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Exploring Targeted Cognitive Training for Clinical Disorders
A series of articles examines how to help enhance current treatments for mental illnesses and spur the development of new intervention and prevention approaches.
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Paying Attention Doesn’t Mean You’ll Remember What You Saw
We can forget a piece of information just seconds after having used it to make a judgment if we don’t have expectations of using it in the future, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. This finding, which has been named “attribute amnesia,” indicates that memory is far more selective than previously thought. "It is commonly believed that you will remember specific details about the things you're attending to, but our experiments show that this is not necessarily true," said researcher Brad Wyble, assistant professor of psychology at Penn State.
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Language on Twitter Tracks Rates of Coronary Heart Disease
Twitter can serve as a dashboard indicator of a community’s psychological well-being and can predict county-level rates of heart disease.
