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A Smart Answer to the Season of ‘I’m Bored’
The Wall Street Journal: When it comes to summer vacation, Victoria Lau works hard to keep her 6-year-old's days interesting and full. The South San Francisco, Calif., stay-at-home mom sets a weekly activity plan, which includes regular swimming and karate lessons and everything from exploring the local library to crafting origami butterflies and mucking around with Play-Doh. Still, she says, Carter has already voiced the dreaded summer lament. "My son does get bored," she says.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science and Clinical Psychological Science: Immediate Effect of Internal Reward on Visual Adaptation David Pascucci and Massimo Turatto Can exposure to rewards influence our visual experiences? To answer this question, the authors had participants perform a discrimination task during an adaptation period meant to induce the tilt aftereffect -- a visual illusion in which prolonged exposure to an oriented stimulus affects the perception of subsequent stimuli orientations.
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AAA study on cell phones in cars: “Hands-free is not risk-free”
Los Angeles Times: Hands-free phone use while driving — for talking or, especially, for texting — is just plain dangerous, said researchers at the University of Utah who have studied distracted driving for more than a decade.
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The fiction of memory: Elizabeth Loftus at TEDGlobal 2013
TED Blog: Elizabeth Loftus begins her talk at TEDGlobal 2013 with the tragic story of Steve Titus, who was arrested in 1980 because he sort of matched the physical description of, and drove a similar car to, a man who had raped a woman in his area. Looking at a photo lineup, the victim told police that Titus looked “the closest” to the man who had raped her. But by the time the trial began, the victim had become certain that Titus was the attacker. Memory scholar Elizabeth Loftus worked on this case, and became fascinated by the question: How did the victim’s memory go from uncertain to certain?
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Women Better at Remembering Faces, Study Finds
US News & World Report: Women are better at remembering faces than men, according to a new study, partly because they spend more time studying facial features without being aware of it. Canadian researchers used eye-tracking technology to monitor where study participants looked -- such as the eyes, nose or mouth -- when they were shown a series of different faces on a computer screen. Each face was given a name that the researchers asked participants to remember.
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Buzz on Energy Drinks: No Better Than Caffeine
LiveScience: Despite the "special blend" of ingredients, energy drinks work no better than ordinary caffeine at helping us pay attention, a new study suggests. In the study, researchers examined participants' brain activity while they performed a task designed to require attention. Specifically, the researchers looked at how fast the brain responded to a change in letters appearing on a computer screen. Before the task, participants consumed 8 ounces of either water, water with caffeine, or water containing the energy drink 5-Hour Energy.
