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Baby Talk is Universal
A major function of speech is the communication of intentions. In everyday conversation between adults, intentions are conveyed through multiple channels, including the syntax and semantics of the language, but also through nonverbal vocal cues such as pitch, loudness, and rate of speech. The same thing occurs when we talk to infants. Regardless of the language we speak, most adults, for example, raise their voices to elicit the infant’s attention and talk at a much slower rate to communicate effectively. In the scientific community, this baby talk is termed “infant-directed speech.” There are direct relationships between the way we speak and what we wish to convey.
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Loneliness is Bad for Your Health
Psychologica scientists are disentangling social isolation, loneliness, and the physical deterioration and diseases of aging, right down to the cellular level.
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New Study Shows That Infants Have “Mind-Reading” Capability
One of the unique characteristics of humans that distinguish us from the animal kingdom is the ability to represent others’ beliefs in our own minds. This sort of intuitive mind-reading, according to experts, lays the cognitive foundations of interpersonal understanding and communication. Despite its importance, scientists have yet to reach a consensus on how this psychological function develops. Some argue that this complex and flexible ability is acquired at the age of 3-4 years and only after prerequisites such as language grammar are fulfilled. Others suggest specialized developmental mechanisms are in place at birth, allowing infants to refine this ability very early in life.
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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.
