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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.
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Kind Words Can Lead to Harsh Consequences
MSNBC: Politeness has a place, but not in high-stakes situations, according to researchers. Whether a pilot is making an emergency flight or a doctor is trying to help a patient make a surgical decision, the sort of vague, evasive responses that help us avoid hurting someone's feelings can have disastrous consequences, according to a team of scientists, including Jean-François Bonnefon and Wim de Neys of the National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Toulouse in France, and Aidan Feeney of Queen's University in the United Kingdom. The more sensitive an issue, the more polite we tend to become, according to the researchers.
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What Happens To Our Decision-Making Brain As We Age
Huffington Post: It's 2031, and you are among the first humans to set foot on Mars. You and the other pioneering astronauts have discovered that there is actually a small amount of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere, but you need to figure out how to extract it. The future colonization of the Red Planet depends on your success in this task. Imagine you're the leader of this mission, and you have two oxygen extraction systems that might work. You need to pick someone to test the two competing systems, and you have two equally qualified candidates. One is an up-and-comer, just turned 20 and eager to make his mark. The other is 67, a veteran. Which do you put in charge of this crucial job?
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Profanity on TV Linked to Foul-Mouthed Kids
U.S. News & World Report: Is TV turning our kids into fountains of four-letter words? Maybe so, says a new study that finds a link between foul-mouthed inner-city children and profanity-ridden shows and video games. However, the research doesn't confirm that exposure to trash-talking adults directly leads to swearing among kids, nor does it explain why non-aggressive cussing might be a bad thing. And the actual size of the possible effect is unknown, although the study's lead author called it "moderate." "As a society we've gotten pretty lax concerning profanity. We're desensitized to it," said the author, Sarah M. Coyne, an assistant professor at Brigham Young University.
