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To Play or Not to Play with Your Kid?
It shouldn’t be this hard to decide. ... Yet some parents seem to be absorbing the message—especially from social media, the great flattener of nuanced communications—that in playing with their kids, they might be doing them a disservice, and that all children, regardless of age, temperament, or ability, should be capable of initiating and sustaining play for long periods. I asked Roberta Golinkoff, a developmental psychologist and the founder of the Child’s Play, Learning, and Development Lab at the University of Delaware, if she has come across any research supporting such interpretations. “I’ve been in this business a long time,” she said—50 years.
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What Type of Templates Do We Use for Visual Processing? Caricatures Might Be the Answer
Podcast: This episode’s conversation reviews how our visual system uses templates and exaggerates the basic features of objects in memory.
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Your Cynicism Isn’t Helping Anybody
When I describe “cynics,” you might conjure up a certain type of person: the toxic, smirking misanthrope, oozing contempt. But they are not a fixed category, like New Zealanders or anesthesiologists. Cynicism is a spectrum. We all have cynical moments, or in my case, cynical years. Cynicism—the belief that all people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest—is a natural response to a world reeling from social division, rising sea levels, and countless other problems. But that doesn’t mean it helps us. Cynics suffer at basically every level scientists can measure.
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Chatbots Are Primed to Warp Reality
More and more people are learning about the world through chatbots and the software’s kin, whether they mean to or not. ... Pataranutaporn and his fellow researchers recently sought to understand how chatbots could manipulate our understanding of the world by, in effect, implanting false memories. To do so, the researchers adapted methods used by the UC Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who established decades ago that memory is manipulable. ... Loftus, who collaborated on the study, told me that one of the most powerful techniques for memory manipulation—whether by a human or by an AI—is to slip falsehoods into a seemingly unrelated question. ...
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What Makes a Friendship Last Forever?
There are many flavors of friendship. Most U.S. adults say they have pals who fit into specific niches in their lives, like gym friends or work friends. These relationships may come and go as life circumstances change, fading away when someone switches jobs or loses interest in a shared hobby. ...
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Do You Have a Case of the ‘September Scaries?’
If January is the Monday of the calendar year, then summer is clearly its weekend — June is its Friday, July its Saturday and August its lazy, delicious, fretful Sunday. Which is why so many of us currently find ourselves in the grips of the “September Scaries.” ... You could also try “microdosing” a few September tasks this week, said Christian Waugh, a professor of psychology at Wake Forest University who studies positive coping mechanisms. Slow transitions are always easier than rapid ones, he said. He also recommended ditching the “good-bad dichotomy” of summer fun versus September obligation.
