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Peer Pressure for Teens Paves the Path to Adulthood
The Wall Street Journal: New studies on peer pressure suggest that teens—who often seem to follow each other like lemmings—may do so because their brains derive more pleasure from social acceptance than adult brains, and not because teens are less capable of making rational decisions. And scientists say facing the influence of friends represents an important developmental step for teens on their way to becoming independent-thinking adults.
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People are over confident despite errors
Business Standard: A new study suggests that overprecision is a common and robust form of overconfidence driven, at least in part, by excessive certainty in the accuracy of our judgments. The research, conducted by researchers Albert Mannes of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Don Moore of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, revealed that the more confident participants were about their estimates of an uncertain quantity, the less they adjusted their estimates in response to feedback about their accuracy and to the costs of being wrong. Read the whole story: Business Standard
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Study: Women Better At Remembering Faces Than Men
CBS: Women spend more time studying facial features than men, thus making them better at remembering faces than their male counterparts. A new study from Canadian researchers found that women have a heightened attention toward facial features on a subconscious level. “We discovered that women look more at new faces than men do, which allows them to create a richer and more superior memory,” said study co-author Jennifer Heisz, an assistant kinesiology professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, in a news release. Read the whole story: CBS
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Why Do We Remember Faces but Not Names?
NPR Science Friday: It’s happened to all of us: We're at an event and recognize peoples’ faces all over the room, but names utterly escape us. Don’t feel bad. When it comes to linking faces and names, the deck is stacked against us from evolutionary, neuroanatomical, and practical perspectives. For starters, our brains are far better equipped at storing visual data, such as a face, than a briefly heard name. “We are visual creatures,” says E. Clea Warburton, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Bristol. “Our brain has got more cortex devoted to processing visual information compared to that from our other senses.
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Letting Go of Keeping Up
The Atlantic: Everyone's heard of the phrase, "Keeping up with the Joneses," which refers to the phenomenon of using one's neighbors as a standard of comparison for the consumption of material goods. (For example: it's hard not to notice when your neighbor buys a luxury sports car, and it's even harder to keep yourself from wondering whether it might be time for you to upgrade as well...even if it means reducing contributions to your retirement fund to pay for it.) Our neighbors, however, are no longer our only salient standard of comparison.
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Brain Can Plan Actions Toward Things the Eye Doesn’t See
People can plan strategic movements to several different targets at the same time, even when they see far fewer targets than are actually present, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. A team of researchers at the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario took advantage of a pictorial illusion -- known as the “connectedness illusion” -- that causes people to underestimate the number of targets they see. "The Connectedness Illusion": Connecting the circles creates the illusion of fewer circles on the right.
