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The Roots of Grammar: New Study Shows Children Innately Prepared to Learn Language
To learn a language, a child must learn a set of all-purpose rules, such as “a sentence can be formed by combining a subject, a verb and an object” that can be used in an infinite number of ways. A new study shows that by the age of seven months, human infants are on the lookout for abstract rules – and that they know the best place to look for such abstractions is in human speech.
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Study Offers Clues into Rumination, Symptoms of Severe Depression
One of the most difficult and paradoxical symptoms of depression is obsessive thinking about the disease itself. Many people suffering from depression describe not only an inability to banish sad memories, but also a preoccupation with the origins and nature of disabling melancholy. Psychologists call this rumination. People with such obsessive thinking have more frequent bouts of depression, and the episodes tend to be more severe and more long-lasting. As a result, psychologists are very interested in knowing just what is happening in the brain during depressive rumination. Why can’t severely depressed people move on to healthier, happier thoughts?
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Infants Able to Distinguish Positive/Negative Parenting, Study Shows
Nearly half a century ago, psychiatrist John Bowlby proposed that the instincts underpinning infants’ attachment to their mother are accompanied by “internal working models,” which help them to better understand the world around them. These mental models mediate infants’ ability to use their caregiver as a buffer against the stresses of life, and help facilitate the development of important self-regulatory and social skills. Yet no research has ever directly assessed internal working models of attachment in infancy.
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UCL scientist develops a measure of distraction
A scientific indicator of how easily distracted you are has been designed by a UCL (University College London) psychologist. It could be used as another assessment tool during the recruitment process and would have particular benefits in fields where employee distraction could lead to fatal errors. People who are more easily distracted are at greater risk of being involved in accidents. Professor Nilli Lavie, UCL Psychology, who led the research published today in the Association for Psychological Science journal, said: “When you are easily distracted, you are more liable to do things like put your keys in the fridge or call out ‘come in’ when answering the phone.
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Multi-tasking is Hardest in the Early Morning
Multitasking seems to come easier for some and is virtually impossible for others, however new research shows that it is difficult for all in the late night and early morning. Previous studies have shown that the time of day greatly affects human’s reaction time (for a review, see Carrier & Monk, 2000). This performance decrement is constantly found during the night with its’ lowest point in the early morning. This leads to the assumption that the time of day directly affects the speed of cognitive processing. Daniel Bratzke at the University of Tuebingen wished to take these studies a bit further and figure out what makes our reaction time so slow during the wee hours.
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Brain Shows Humans Break Down Events into Smaller Units.
In order to comprehend the continuous stream of cacophonies and visual stimulation that battle for our attention, humans will breakdown activities into smaller, more digestible chunks, a phenomenon that psychologists describe as “event structure perception.” Event structure perception was originally believed to be confined to our visual system, but new research published in the May issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reports that a similar process occurs when reading about everyday events as well.
