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How Do We Recognize Faces?
How do we recognize a face? Do we pick out “local” features— an eye or a mouth— and extrapolate from there? Or do we take in the “global” configuration—facial structure, distance between the features—at once? Now, a group of psychologists— Sébastien Miellet and Philippe G. Schyns at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and Roberto Caldara at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland—have settled the longstanding debate between scientists who hold to the “local” strategy and those who favor the “global” one. “Face processing does not rely on a rigid system or a unique and mandatory information sampling strategy,” said Miellet.
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Riots in Vancouver are the latest connected to high-profile championship sporting events
Los Angeles Times: The morning after rioters made their mark on the city that he loves, Al Cyrenne made his. Cyrenne, who lives close enough to downtown Vancouver that he could see the smoke rising from cars that vandals set aflame, made his way into the destruction zone Thursday with a push broom and a felt-tipped marker. He spent three hours sweeping up glass and debris, then used his marker to scrawl a message on a boarded-up store window: "The real people of Vancouver are here today." The ugliness from the night before lingered.
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Understanding the gift of endless memory
CBS News (60 Minutes): Enter Dr. James McGaugh, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California Irvine, and a renowned expert on memory. Dr. McGaugh is the first to discover and study superior autobiographical memory, and he is quizzing Owen - his fifth subject - to find out. "Let's move back in time now to 1990. It rained on several days in January and February, can you name the dates on which it rained?" McGaugh asked. Believe it or not, she could. "Let's see. It was slightly rainy and cloudy on January 14th, 15th. It was very hot the weekend of the 27th, 28th, no rain," she replied. Read more: CBS News (60 Minutes)
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Viewing negative emotion-laden images can boost memory
Yahoo Singapore: Washington, June 19 (ANI): A new research has suggested that witnessing a negative and shocking image enhances the retention of everything that one learns before seeing them. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found that viewing emotion-laden images such as, a menacing drill sergeant, a gory slaughterhouse or a devastating scene of a natural disaster, immediately after taking a test actually increases people's retention of the tested material. "Memory is labile and dynamic - after you retrieve something, you're still engaged in processing that information in some way," said Bridgid Finn, PhD, postdoctoral researcher in psychology in Arts and Sciences.
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What Do We Pay Attention To?
Once we learn the relationship between a cue and its consequences—say, the sound of a bell and the appearance of the white ice cream truck bearing our favorite chocolate cone—do we turn our attention to that bell whenever we hear it? Or do we tuck the information away and marshal our resources to learning other, novel cues—a recorded jingle, or a blue truck? Psychologists observing “attentional allocation” now agree that the answer is both, and they have arrived at two principles to describe the phenomena. The “predictive” principle says we search for meaningful—important—cues amid the “noise” of our environments.
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Genetic Basis for Crime: A New Look
The New York Times: It was less than 20 years ago that the National Institutes of Health abruptly withdrew funds for a conference on genetics and crime after outraged complaints that the idea smacked of eugenics. The president of the Association of Black Psychologists at the time declared that such research was in itself “a blatant form of stereotyping and racism.” The tainted history of using biology to explain criminal behavior has pushed criminologists to reject or ignore genetics and concentrate on social causes: miserable poverty, corrosive addictions, guns.
