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Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Importance of Perspective-Taking
Scientific American: I often find myself walking into the kitchen (or the living room or bedroom or wherever), unable to recall why I was going there in the first place. What I do in those cases is retrace my steps, until I am back to where I began my trip. And more often than not, the location triggers the precise association that prompted me to move in the first place, and I triumphantly return to the place of forgetfulness, ready to do whatever it is that needs doing. In this case, I’m exploiting the close contextual nature of memory: our minds respond to cues in our surroundings to retrieve whatever it was that needed retrieving.
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Concussion testing for student athletes is common, but some question its worth
The Washington Post: If you have a child playing ice hockey, lacrosse, soccer or football this fall, chances are good he or she has taken a computerized examination called ImPACT, for Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing. About 2 million U.S. athletes of all ages have taken the test, which measures mental abilities such as word and shape recall, reaction time, attention and working memory. Athletes are given a baseline test at the start of a season; those who suffer a concussion are tested again before being allowed to return to play. The increased prevalence of ImPACT reflects growing public unease about the state of our kids’ gray matter.
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Are handsome men never good in bed because they never had to be?
Examiner: A new study from the Association for Psychological Science says that people shouldn't take gender differences in sexuality at face value. To what gender stereotypes do TV shows expose most people? And which shows break the stereotypes? Does a new study from the Association for Psychological Science say in a press release that TV-repeated stereotypes say that good looking people are lousy in the bedroom because they're so attractive they don't have to be good in the bedroom? Or does a new study just look at entertainment's stereotypes of good-looking men in the bedroom? Read the whole story: Examiner
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Babies as young as six months remember more than we thought
The Star-Ledger: What do babies remember? Adults can’t recall their own infant years, so they often assume babies themselves don’t remember much, either. That assumption is wrong, as researchers at Rutgers University continue to prove. Their latest discovery, published in the journal Psychological Science, is that even when babies can’t remember the details of a missing object, they do remember it exists. These littlest study participants can hardly tell anyone this, however. "It’s not easy to study babies and toddlers. They don’t cooperate," says Alan Leslie, director of the university’s Cognitive Development Lab on Busch Campus, Piscataway.
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Forgetting Is Part Of Remembering
It's time for forgetting to get some respect, says Ben Storm, author of a new article on memory in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “We need to rethink how we're talking about forgetting and realize that under some conditions it actually does play an important role in the function of memory,” says Storm, who is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Memory is difficult. Thinking is difficult,” Storm says. Memories and associations accumulate rapidly.
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Learning The Look of Love: That Sly ‘Come Hither’ Stare
Scientific American: While it might not be witchcraft, the formula for ‘love at first sight’ remains a mystery. However, if you pop the following ingredients into a kettle: large pupils, long glances, and a lovely, attentive smile, you may not have concocted a bona fide love potion but your witch’s brew could contain some insight into the laws of attraction. Being an optometrist and all around eye aficionado, I have a deep interest in the connection between the eyes and love.
