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Growing In Circles: New Study Examines How Rearing Environment Can Alter Navigation
Many animals, including humans, frequently face the task of getting from one place to another. Although many navigational strategies exist, all vertebrate species readily use geometric cues; things such as walls and corners to determine direction within an enclosed space. Moreover, some species such as rats and human children are so influenced by these geometric cues that they often ignore more reliable features such as a distinctive object or colored wall. This surprising reliance on geometry has led researchers to suggest the existence of a geometric module in the brain.
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Regrettably, Humans Mispredict Their Emotions After Decision Making
Behavioral research over the past 15 years has confirmed what anyone who has purchased a house or dumped a significant other could tell you: When people make decisions, they anticipate that they may regret their choices. It is important that we maintain this ability, because as the aforementioned house-buyers and spouse-dumpers know, regret can be a terrible feeling. How accurate are people in their anticipations of regret – and of other post-decisional emotions, such as disappointment? It is a topic has been rather neglected by scientists, but new research published in the August issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, aims to fill this gap.
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They All Look the Same: Why we are Unable to Distinguish Faces of Other Races (and Sometimes Our Own)
There’s a troubling psychological phenomenon that just about everyone has experienced but few will admit to; having difficulty distinguishing between people of different racial groups. This isn’t merely a nod to the denigrating expression “they all look the same.” Indeed, the “cross-race effect” is one of the most well replicated findings in psychological research and can lead to embarrassment, social castigation, or the disturbingly common occurrence of eye-witness misidentifications.
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Ability to “Tell the Difference” Declines as Infants Age
A new article published in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that infants fine-tune their visual and auditory systems to stimuli during the first year of life, essentially “weeding out” unnecessary discriminatory abilities. Lisa Scott, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and her colleagues examined several studies suggesting that infants begin to hone their perceptual discrimination to environmentally relevant distinctions by 9-12 months of age. At the same time, the discrimination of environmentally irrelevant, or less frequently encountered, distinctions declines.
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The Unexpected Consensus Among Voting Methods
Historically, the theoretical social choice literature on voting procedures in economics and political science routinely highlights worst case scenarios, emphasizing the inexistence of a universally ‘best’ voting method. Indeed, the Impossibility Theorem of Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow proved that no voting method can ever satisfy all of his requirements simultaneously. But as the U.S. Presidential election of 2000 reminds us, voting methods continue to court controversy, and there are many efforts under way to reform the electoral system at all levels of government.
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Seeing Colors: New Study Sheds Light on Sensory System Quirk
In the psychological phenomenon known as “synesthesia,” individuals’ sensory systems are a bit more intertwined than usual. Some musicians, for example, report seeing colors when musical notes are played. One of the most common forms is grapheme-color synesthesia, in which letters or numbers (collectively called “graphemes”) are highlighted with particular colors. Although synesthesia has been well documented, it is unknown whether these experiences, reported as vivid and realistic, are actually being perceived or if they are a byproduct of some other psychological mechanism such as memory.
