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What happens to math nerds when they get older
Financial Post: New scientific studies continue to escalate the hard work vs. raw talent debate. One study from Vanderbilt University shifts things in favor of raw talent. Professors David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow discovered that SAT scores at age 12 are a good indicator of your college major and job in the future. These charts compare 12 year olds at the bottom end of the top quartile for math with a group at the top end of the top quartile for math; in other words, the lesser math nerds versus the super math nerds. Compared to lesser math nerds, super math nerds were twice as likely to get a doctorate.
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The Certainty of Memory Has Its Day in Court
The New York Times: Witness testimony has been the gold standard of the criminal justice system, revered in courtrooms and crime dramas as the evidence that clinches a case. Yet scientists have long cautioned that the brain is not a filing cabinet, storing memories in a way that they can be pulled out, consulted and returned intact. Memory is not so much a record of the past as a rough sketch that can be modified even by the simple act of telling the story. For scientists, memory has been on trial for decades, and courts and public opinion are only now catching up with the verdict.
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Why Creative Types May Be More Likely to Cheat
TIME: Creative people think "outside the box," a gift of psychological flexibility that, it turns out, may also apply to their ethics, according to the latest research from the American Psychological Association. Creative types, in other words, may be more likely to cheat. The same enterprising mind that allows creative people to consider new possibilities, generate original ideas, and resolve conflicts innovatively may be what also helps them justify their own dishonest behavior, said the authors of the new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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Look Out, Kids: Competitiveness Peaks in Middle Age
Miller-McCune: In our culture, competitiveness is usually associated with youth. Think of sporting contests, music competitions (both of the classical virtuoso and pop diva varieties), or the pressure-packed process of applying to prestigious universities. It now appears watching eager young performers in action may have skewed our view of the competitive urge. Newly published research suggests the instinct to bet on the superiority of one’s skills peaks around age 50.
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2 Scientists Receive Grawemeyer Award for Psychology
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Two scientists with the National Institute of Mental Health will receive the 2012 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology for their research on how the brain works, the university has announced. The researchers, Leslie Ungerleider and Mortimer Mishkin, were the first to show that the brain uses separate visual-processing systems to recognize objects and fix their location, a concept described in the award announcement as the "what and where" pathways idea. "Few ideas have been so influential on the field of psychology and neuroscience," said Heywood M.
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Why Do Some People Never Forget A Face?
“Face recognition is an important social skill, but not all of us are equally good at it,” says Beijing Normal University cognitive psychologist Jia Liu. But what accounts for the difference? A new study by Liu and colleagues Ruosi Wang, Jingguang Li, Huizhen Fang, and Moqian Tian provides evidence that the inequality of abilities is rooted in the unique way in which the mind perceives faces. “Individuals who process faces more holistically”—that is, as an integrated whole—“are better at face recognition,” says Liu. The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.
