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Illusions Fool Even the Blind
The New York Times: That bats use echolocation to navigate and to find food is well known. But some blind people use the technique, too, clicking their tongues and snapping fingers to help identify objects. Now, a study reports that human echolocators can experience illusions, just as sighted individuals do. Gavin Buckingham, a psychology lecturer at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, and his colleagues at the University of Western Ontario asked 10 study subjects to pick up strings attached to three boxes of identical weight but different sizes. Overwhelmingly, the sighted individuals succumbed to what is known as the “size-weight illusion.” The bigger boxes felt lighter to them.
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People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened
Lab-based research shows that adults can be convinced, over the course of a few hours, that as teens they perpetrated crimes that never actually occurred.
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The Psychology of the Shortlist
The Huffington Post: Imagine this scenario: A plum job has opened up, one that you really want and feel well qualified to hold. So you go through the rigorous process of applying. You line up references, write essays, and finally get an interview. The interview goes well and you're feeling confident, and indeed you get a call saying you've been shortlisted for the job. Out of a pool of a hundred applicants, you are among just three who are highly and equally qualified. Would you come back in for another round of interviews? You can almost taste victory now. So you do the interviews, and again all seems to go very well. Then the job goes to someone else.
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Choosing Between Carrots and Cake Is a Snap Decision, Researchers Say
ABC News: Whether you stick to your diet or give into temptation comes down to just milliseconds, a new study suggests. Researchers from Caltech tested this theory by asking 28 volunteers to rate the health virtues of more than 150 foods after fasting for four hours. The subjects were then shown random pairings of foods on a computer screen, one healthier than the other, then invited to choose between two. On average, information about taste begins influencing the decision making process about 200 milliseconds sooner than health information, according to findings published in the latest issue of the journal Psychological Science.
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How Blind People Use Echolocation to Get Around
New York Magazine: Echolocation — sending out a sound wave, hearing how it bounces back at you, and using that information to navigate your environment — is a technique generally associated with animals like bats and dolphins, not people. And yet some visually impaired folks learn to use finger snaps or tongue clicks to help them get around. In a study published in Psychological Science, a team led by Gavin Buckingham of Heriot-Watt University in Scotland tried to learn about how this skill works.
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Using Science to Help Teach Teens Safe Driving Skills
Young drivers have a reputation for being among the most dangerous on the road for good reason; according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), teen drivers, per mile driven, are nearly three times more likely than drivers older than 20 to be in a fatal crash, particularly in the first few months after receiving their license. This week at the Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., psychological scientists presented innovative research on how we learn to transition from accident-prone novices to safer drivers as we gain experience behind the wheel. “The over representation of novice drivers in road accidents across the world is consistent.
