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Touch Can Produce Detailed, Lasting Memories
Exploring objects through touch can generate detailed, durable memories for those objects, even when we don’t intend to memorize the object’s details.
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Bringing Up Baby
Bababababa, dadadadada, ahgagaga. Got that? Babies are speaking to us all the time, but most of us have no clue what they're saying. To us non-babies, it all sounds like charming, mysterious, gobbledegook. To researchers, though, babbling is knowable, predictable, and best of all, teachable. This week, we'll find out how to decipher the vocabulary, and the behavior, of the newest members of the human family. In the second half of the show, we'll look at the relationship between children and the adults who care for them.
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How to Handle Difficult Conversations at Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is America’s yearly celebration of family togetherness. But with partisan divisions at a boiling point after the polarizing midterm election and a punishing political year, many are bracing themselves for a war of words at the dinner table this Thursday. For the past two decades, Peter Coleman, the director of the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict at Columbia University, has been studying what happens when people clash over politics. “There’s been a big increase in contempt for the other side, the idea that they are ignorant, selfish and out to harm America,” said Dr. Coleman, a professor of education and psychology.
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Another Mass Shooting? ‘Compassion Fatigue’ Is A Natural Reaction
Roger Chui first learned about the mass shooting that killed 12 people in a packed bar Wednesday night in Thousand Oaks, Calif., when he woke up the morning after and turned on his phone. "And I was like 'Oh, that seems really soon after Pittsburgh and Louisville,' " says the software developer in Lexington, Ky. "I thought we'd get more of a break." Chui feels like these kinds of shootings happen in the U.S. so often now that when he hears about them all he can think about is, "Oh well, it happened again I guess." He's not alone. Ginger Ellenbecker, a high school biology teacher in Lawrence, Kan., has similar feelings. "My immediate reaction was, 'Another one. Here's another one.
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Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses
Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news. In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior.
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How to Trick Yourself into Improving Your Performance
You’ve probably heard by now that trying to multitask is a terrible idea. One main reason is that our neural wiring does not allow us to split our attention: when we try to attend to two things at once, all we actually do is switch our focus back and forth between them. Darting our attentional spotlight around in this way decreases our performance, as multiple studies have shown. The consequences can be deadly: texting while driving is more dangerous than drunk driving.
