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Cognitive Factors May Predict the Need for Speed
Driving over the speed limit is the most common violation drivers make and one of the biggest contributors to traffic crashes. Speeding is estimated to have contributed to 30% of all fatal automobile crashes in the US, resulting in 10,219 deaths in 2012 alone. Considering the very real dangers of speeding, why do some of us do it so often? Psychological scientists Mark A. Elliott and James A.
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The Disturbing Link Between Sleep Deprivation And False Memories
The Huffington Post: Sleep deprivation is a serious safety issue and has been implicated in everything from oil spills to plane crashes to nuclear power plant explosions. It turns out that getting a healthy amount of sleep could also be a justice issue. A novel study out of University of California, Irvine suggests that sleep deprivation could partly be to blame for false memories -- a phenomenon in which people absorb incorrect information after an event and end up misremembering the incident. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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Older People May Do Poorly on Cognitive Tests Partly Because They Don’t Care About the Tests
New York Magazine: Tom Hess, a University of North Carolina professor and author of a new study inPerspectives on Psychological Science, is trying to understand a strange finding: Even though older adults show declines when they are given tests of cognitive function, they often continue working (and living) at a high level that doesn’t appear to reflect much of a decline. What, then, aren’t the tests capturing, and why?
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Actually, Practice Doesn’t Always Make Perfect — New Study
The Washington Post: We’ve long been eager to believe that mastery of a skill is primarily the result of how much effort one has put in. Extensive practice “is probably the most reasonable explanation we have today not only for success in any line, but even for genius,” said the ur-behaviorist John B. Watson almost a century ago. In the 1990s K. Anders Ericsson and a colleague at Florida State University reported data that seemed to confirm this view: What separates the expert from the amateur, a first-rate musician or chess player from a wannabe, isn’t talent; it’s thousands of hours of work.
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Spotted at last: “Homo economicus”?
Discover Magazine: Economists like to say that, to a first approximation, we are. In other words, that we tend to seek to maximize our own rewards, in a more or less rational manner. The trouble is that this theory (at least, a straightforward interpretation of it) doesn’t describe how people behave in many situations. For example, given a sum of money and asked to decide how to split it between themselves and an anonymous stranger, most people choose to give some of it away. This scenario is called the Dictator Game, and along with a handful of similar tasks, it’s a problem for the selfish theory. But what if some people do behave in an economically optimal way?
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Want to Know When You’ll Die? ‘Big Data’ Could Tell You
Newsweek: Last year, a life insurance agent came to Nathan DeWall’s Lexington, Kentucky, home to weigh him, take his blood pressure and ask a litany of health- and life-related questions to predict when the 34-year-old would die. A few weeks later, DeWall received an envelope in the mail, containing the result: He would live to be 88. “What does that number really mean?” asks DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky who studies how people cope with the prospect of their own mortality. Would a few extra slices of pizza push him down to 87.7? Would a bit more time on the treadmill move the needle to 88.3? Read the whole story: Newsweek
