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The Ultimate Learning Machines
Last July, I went to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the blue-sky government research lab that helped to invent the computer and the internet. I was there, strange as it may seem, to talk about babies. The latest big DARPA research project, Machine Common Sense, is funding collaborations between child psychologists like me and computer scientists. This year I also talked about children’s minds at Google, Facebook and Apple. Why are quintessentially geeky places like DARPA and Google suddenly interested in talking about something as profoundly ungeeky as babies?
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New Research from Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring sounds and symbolism, object-based attention, and reward exploration.
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Good Habits, Bad Habits: A Conversation with Wendy Wood
Early in her academic career, psychologist Wendy Wood noticed a trend: many of her fellow graduate students and professors struggled to get things done in the highly demanding but unstructured academic environment. Intelligence, talent, and motivation didn’t seem to matter—some of those who were struggling to stick to project plans or meet deadlines were among the brightest of the group. Why, she wondered, was it so easy to make the initial decision to change but so hard to persist in the long term? Willpower didn’t seem to be the issue—her colleagues wanted to and were trying to change—so what was? Over the past three decades, Wood has sought the answers to these questions.
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The Science of Getting Over It
Despite our commitment to 24/7 news, unlimited-data plans, and bottomless mimosas, nothing lasts forever. So how should we handle life’s endings and last hurrahs? Should we rage against the dying of the light, or be content to let things go? ... [6] Another study, this one focusing on end-of-life professionals such as hospice workers, found that firsthand exposure to death left these people more likely to “live in the present, cultivate a spiritual life and reflect deeply on the continuity of life.”
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The Psychology Behind How You Decide What Halloween Candy to Give Trick-or-Treaters
You can be forgiven for having a panic attack the next time you’re confronted with a bunch of little Spider-Mans and Elsas at your door demanding candy on Halloween. After all, you may feel judged by trick-or-treaters who think you’re being stingy because of your choice of candy. Maybe those tiny fun-size bags of Skittles just don’t cut it? Or at least some stores and candy brands may want you to feel that way. ... As a new Fortune story points out, retailers like Costco and Amazon now routinely push bulk quantities of full-size Snickers and Hershey bars.
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I Heard It Before, So It Must Be True
Psychologist Lisa Fazio of Vanderbilt University, in collaboration with David Rand of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Gordon Pennycook of the University of Regina, Canada, set out to determine whether the illusory truth effect occurs across levels of plausibility, or whether it applies only to ambiguous statements. To find out, the researchers used computational simulations combined with a large online study, completed via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk large-scale testing system.
