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Overexposed? Camera Phones Could Be Washing Out Our Memories
NPR: Los Angeles blogger Rebecca Woolf uses her blog, Girl's Gone Child, as a window into her family's life. Naturally, it includes oodles of pictures of her four children. She says she's probably taken tens of thousands of photos since her oldest child was born. And she remembers the moment when it suddenly clicked — if you will — that she was too absorbed in digital documentation. "I remember going to the park at one point, and looking around ... and seeing that everyone was on their phones ... not taking photographs, but just — they had a device in their hands," she recalls. Read the whole story: NPR
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Speed-Reading Reborn for Smartphones, Smartwatches
Scientific American: Speed-reading is either a productivity enhancer or a gimmick that lets people gobble up content without really understanding or retaining what they’ve read. This debate—dating back to the late 1950s—resurfaced recently when Samsung integrated the new Spritz speed-reading app into the high-profile Galaxy S5 smartphone and Gear 2 smartwatchlaunched last month.
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Want to Really Appreciate Your Food? A Higher Price May do the Trick
Los Angeles Times: If you could get a $5 lunch for $1, would it taste better? Be a more satisfying lunch? If you chose the bargain, guess again. Price affects consumer satisfaction, and getting a deal doesn't necessarily make diners like their food better, according to researchers at Cornell University who frequently study human behavior and eating habits. Read the whole story: Los Angeles Times
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Why That Video Went Viral
The New York Times: There it was, virtual gold: a video of a firefighter resuscitating a kitten trapped in a smoky home. Neetzan Zimmerman, then an editor at Gawker, a news and gossip site, knew it was destined for viral magic. But before he could publish a post about it, his editor made a request. Mr. Zimmerman was to include the epilogue omitted by most every other outlet: The kitten died of smoke inhalation soon after being saved. For telling the whole story, Mr. Zimmerman paid a price. “That video did tremendously well for practically everyone who posted it,” he recalled, “except Gawker.” Why should one sad detail mean the difference between an online megahit and a dud?
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Steering Through Curves: The Eyes Have It
When we encounter curves in the road when we’re driving, our ability to handle the wheel isn’t the fundamental key to navigating through the bend. Recent research provided key insights on the critical role that our eyes play when we steer through road curves. The study by psychological scientist Otto Lappi of the University of Helsinki shows that tiny eye movements allow drivers to predict a vehicle’s trajectory in a curve. Lappi and his research group used new and innovative methods to analyze the small and subtle eye movements that drivers make when driving through a curve. These optokinetic eye movements take only fractions of a second, and the driver is not aware of them.
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Same Face, Many First Impressions
Slight variations in how an individual face is viewed can lead people to develop significantly different first impressions of that individual, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our findings suggest that impressions from still photos of individuals could be deeply misleading,” says psychological scientist and study author Alexander Todorov of Princeton University. Previous research has shown that people form first impressions about someone's personality after viewing their face only briefly.
