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Perception and Peak Performance
The New York Times: Like many of us during March Madness, Jessica Witt is a college basketball fan. She is also a professor of psychology at Purdue University. Those interests converged recently at a Purdue basketball game, as she watched fans noisily try to distract the opposing players during free throws. The fans hooted, stomped and waved streamers — but it didn’t seem to have any effect on the outcome. Dr. Witt wondered whether other interventions might. As director of the Action-Modulated Perception Lab at Purdue, she’d previously demonstrated that for successful tennis players and field-goal kickers, the ball or goal looks larger than it does to players not enjoying a hot streak.
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Brains of Kids With Math Anxiety Function Differently, Says Study
ABC: Kids who get the jitters before a math test may actually have different brain functions than kids without math anxiety, according to a new study. Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine recruited about 50 second and third graders and separated them into either a high-math anxiety group or a low-anxiety group based on a standard questionnaire they modified for 7- to 9-year-olds. They scanned the children’s brains while the kids did addition and subtraction problems. They found that children with a high level of math anxiety were slower at solving problems and were less accurate than children with lower math anxiety. Read the whole story: ABC
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Good Reads: a new study on God and civilization
The Christian Science Monitor: In The New York Times, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee writes on how learning a second language at an early age makes your brain work better. Psychologists once worried that kids who lived in bilingual households faced obstacles that “hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.” Turns out they were right, and that very hindrance turns out to be an advantage. In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language.
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Two cheers for multiple-choice tests
The oldest geyser in Yellowstone National Park is: a. Steamboat Geyser b. Old Faithful c. Castle Geyser d. Daisy Geyser We’ve all answered hundreds if not thousands of these multiple-choice questions over the years. We answer them to get our drivers’ licenses, to get into good colleges and grad schools and professional schools. They’re ubiquitous, yet everyone hates them. Educators dismiss them as simplistic, the enemy of complex learning. Students think they’re unfair. And learning experts say they plain don’t work. To be clear, learning experts are questioning the value of these tests as learning tools.
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A Wandering Mind Reveals Mental Processes and Priorities
Odds are you're not going to make it all the way through this article without thinking about something else. In fact, studies have found that our minds are wandering half the time, drifting off to thoughts unrelated to what we're doing — did I remember to turn off the light? What should I have for dinner? A new study investigating the mental processes underlying a wandering mind reports a role for working memory, a sort of a mental workspace that allows you to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously. Imagine you see your neighbor upon arriving home one day and schedule a lunch date.
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Methodological Innovation: Science’s Unsung Hero
What’s more important to the progress of psychological science: theory or method? Both—and the synergy between the two, says University of Washington psychologist, Anthony G. Greenwald. But there’s a problem: “There’s too much pressure on psychological researchers to publish contributions to theory and not enough to develop more powerful methods,” he says, noting that the pressure is reflected not only in editorial decisions but also in university coursework and PhD programs.
