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Seeing the Glass as Half Full: Taking a New Look at Cognition and Aging
From a cognitive perspective, aging is typically associated with decline. As we age, it may get harder to remember names and dates, and it may take us longer to come up with the right answer to a question. But the news isn’t all bad when it comes to cognitive aging, according to a set of three articles in the July 2014 issue of Perspectives in Psychological Science. Plumbing the depths of the available scientific literature, the authors of the three articles show how several factors -- including motivation and crystallized knowledge -- can play important roles in supporting and maintaining cognitive function in the decades past middle age.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Moral Ties That Bind . . . Even to Out-Groups: The Interactive Effect of Moral Identity and the Binding Moral Foundations Isaac H. Smith, Karl Aquino, Spassena Koleva, and Jesse Graham Moral foundations can bind a group together, but in doing so they can also promote out-group hostility. To examine whether the adoption of binding moral foundations unavoidably leads to out-group hostility, the authors asked participants to rate the extent to which they believed torture was a justifiable technique for interrogating suspected terrorists.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Long-Term Temporal Tracking of Speech Rate Affects Spoken-Word Recognition Melissa M. Baese-Berk, Christopher C. Heffner, Laura C. Dilley, Mark A. Pitt, Tuuli H. Morrill, and J. Devin McAuley Past studies have indicated that the timing of speech can influence the perception of spoken words; however, many of these studies have been performed in a short-term context -- altering the timing of a single phrase, for example. In this study, participants heard a series of utterances played at one of three different global-speech rates.
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Becoming an Expert Takes More Than Practice
Researchers find that the amount of practice accumulated over time does not seem to play a huge role in accounting for individual differences in skill or performance.
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Cognitive Bias May Underlie Both Physical and Financial Health Behaviors
Poor physical health and poor financial health may be driven by the same underlying psychological factors, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Researcher Lamar Pierce, associate professor of strategy at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, and doctoral candidate Timothy Gubler found that an employee’s decision to contribute to a 401(k) retirement plan predicted whether he or she would act to correct poor physical health indicators that were revealed during an employer-sponsored health examination.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Brief Periods of Auditory Perceptual Training Can Determine the Sensory Targets of Speech Motor Learning Daniel R. Lametti, Sonia A. Krol, Douglas M. Shiller, and David J. Ostry Do alterations in the perception of speech affect speech motor learning? To test this, the authors had participants perform a perceptual-training task that was paired with a motor-learning task.
