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New Pitt Study on Alcohol Reveals Drinkers Not Only Zone Out—But Also Are Unaware That They Do
A new study out of the University of Pittsburgh suggests that a moderate dose of alcohol increases a person’s mind wandering, while at the same time reducing the likelihood of noticing that one’s mind has wandered. The paper, titled “Lost in the sauce: The Effects of Alcohol on Mind Wandering,” explores this phenomenon and is published in this month’s issue of Psychological Science. The study provides the first evidence that alcohol disrupts an individual’s ability to realize his or her mind has wandered, suggesting impairment of a psychological state called meta-consciousness.
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Children as Young as 19 Months Understand Different Dialects
We are surrounded by a multitude of different accents every day. Even when a speaker of another English dialect pronounces words differently than we do, we are typically able to recognize their words. Psychologist Catherine Best from MARCS Laboratories, University of Western Sydney, along with colleagues from Haskins Laboratories and Wesleyan University, report a ground-breaking study on the early development of this cross-dialect skill, which they term “phonological constancy.” In this experiment, 15- and 19-month-old American toddlers looked at a colored checkerboard on a monitor in order to hear sets of familiar words or unfamiliar words.
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Five-Month-Old Infants Have Different Expectations for Solids and Liquids
When we knock over a container of pens, not much happens. However, when we knock over a container of cranberry juice, panic can ensue as we try to catch the container before too much juice spills out. These various reactions to our clumsiness are the result of the understanding that solids and liquids have different physical properties and therefore behave very differently. This may seem obvious to us, but when do we develop this discrimination? Previous research has shown that 2-year-olds have different expectations for solids and liquids, but psychologists Susan Hespos, Alissa Ferry, and Lance Rips from Northwestern University wanted to see if children even younger have this skill.
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Cheating the Lie Detector
In its war on terror, the U.S. government uses handheld lie detectors for fast screening of terrorism suspects. It has been shown that the pocket polygraphs have high error rates and are susceptible to successful faking, so the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) was developed as an alternative lie detection tool. Initial assessments of the aIAT reported extremely high accuracy rates.
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Study Suggests Left-Side Bias in Visual Expertise
Facial recognition is not as automatic as it may seem. Researchers have identified specific areas in the brain devoted solely to picking out faces among other objects we encounter. Two specific effects have been established as being critical for facial recognition – holistic processing (in which we view the face as a whole, instead of in various parts) and left-side bias (in which we have a preference for the left side of the face). Psychologists Janet H. Hsiao from the University of Hong Kong and Garrison W. Cottrell from the University of California, San Diego wanted to test if these effects were specific for facial recognition or if they help us to identify other objects as well.
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Study Suggests Buddhist Deity Meditation Temporarily Augments Visuospatial Abilities
Meditation has been practiced for centuries, as a way to calm the soul and bring about inner peace. According to a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, there is now evidence that a specific method of meditation may temporarily boost our visuospatial abilities (for example, the ability to retain an image in visual memory for a long time). That is, the meditation allows practitioners to access a heightened state of visual-spatial awareness that lasts for a limited period of time. Normally when we see something, it is kept in our visual short-term memory for only a brief amount of time (images will begin to fade in a matter of seconds).
