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Babies grasp speech before they utter their first word, a study finds
The Washington Post: Babies start with simple vowel sounds — oohs and aahs. A mere months later, the cooing turns into babbling — “bababa” — showing off a newfound grasp of consonants. A new study has found that a key part of the brain involved in forming speech is firing away in babies as they listen to voices around them. This may represent a sort of mental rehearsal leading up to the true milestone that occurs after only a year of life: baby’s first words. Any parent knows how fast babies learn how to comprehend and use language. The skill develops so rapidly and seemingly without much effort, but how do they do it?
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Is Malcolm Gladwell wrong? Scientists debate the “10,000-hour rule”
Salon: A new study, published in the journal Psychological Science, is fueling the practice-versus-talent debate. The study was co-authored by Zach Hambrick, of Michigan State University, Brooke Macnamara, who is currently at Case Western Reserve University, and Rice University’s Frederick Oswald. According to the New York Times, this study is the “most comprehensive review of relevant research to date.” The paper, which looked at 88 different studies, covering a wide range of activities, from chess to music to sports, found that only 20 to 25 percent of a person’s ability — in music, sports and chess — came from practice.
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Preschoolers Can Reflect on What They Don’t Know
Contrary to previous assumptions, researchers find that preschoolers are able to gauge the strength of their memories and make decisions based on their self-assessments. The study findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Previously, developmental researchers assumed that preschoolers did not introspect much on their mental states, and were not able to reflect on their own uncertainty when problem solving,” says psychological scientist Emily Hembacher of the University of California, Davis, lead author of the study.
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Early risers ‘less moral at night’
BBC: "Morning people", who are more alert early in the day, are more likely to cheat and behave unethically in the night hours, researchers say. Psychologists found that early-rising "larks" and late-night "owls" had different levels of honesty depending on the time of day. The study found a link between ethical choices and such internal clocks. Sunita Sah, research fellow at Harvard University in the US, said this had "implications for workplaces". The research examined the behaviour of almost 200 people - with the subjects taking part in problem-solving tests and games without realising that it was their honesty that was being measured. ...
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Why Is It So Hard for Us to Do Nothing?
The Wall Street Journal: It is summer time, and the living is easy. You can, at last, indulge in what is surely the most enjoyable of human activities—doing absolutely nothing. But is doing nothing really enjoyable? A new study in the journal Science shows that many people would rather get an electric shock than just sit and think. Neuroscientists have inadvertently discovered a lot about doing nothing. In brain-imaging studies, people lie in a confined metal tube feeling bored as they wait for the actual experiment to start. Fortuitously, neuroscientists discovered that this tedium was associated with a distinctive pattern of brain activity.
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Being a Better Online Reader
The New Yorker: Soon after Maryanne Wolf published “Proust and the Squid,” a history of the science and the development of the reading brain from antiquity to the twenty-first century, she began to receive letters from readers. Hundreds of them. While the backgrounds of the writers varied, a theme began to emerge: the more reading moved online, the less students seemed to understand. There were the architects who wrote to her about students who relied so heavily on ready digital information that they were unprepared to address basic problems onsite.
