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Solving for X, among the neurons
I have a fence that needs scraping and painting, and I’m pretty sure I can do the whole job in six hours. My friend Jack, who is an experienced painter, wants me to hire him. He promises he can have a new coat of paint on the fence in four hours. I’m tempted, but I’m wondering, what if Jack and I work together? If he does the trim and other detail work, and I do the easy brushing, we should be able to wrap this job up by lunchtime, easy. But how long will it take, exactly? This is what, in algebra, we call a “word problem.” I always loved word problems when I was in school, because unlike a lot of math, they seemed connected to natural situations that actually occur in real life.
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Le scene hot al cinema anticipano la “prima volta”
La Stampa: Lunghe effusioni tra i protagonisti, incontri da bollino rosso magari con rapporti sessuali non troppi velati. Le scene "hot" che si possono trovare in migliaia di film possono influenzare i giovanissimi spettatori, abbassando anche l'età del primo rapporto. A rivelarlo è un ampio studio dell'University of Missouri (Usa), pubblicato sulla rivista "Association for Psychological Science". «Molte ricerche hanno già dimostrato - spiega Ross O'Hara, autore dello studio - che gli atteggiamenti e i comportamenti sessuali degli adolescenti sono influenzati dai media. Ma il ruolo dei film è stato trascurato.
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New Research on Memory From Psychological Science
Read about new research published in Psychological Science that examines how we represent and search for things in memory. Saved by a Log: How Do Humans Perform Hybrid Visual and Memory Search? Jeremy M. Wolfe Current theories of how humans perform concurrent visual and memory-based searches are based on very small set sizes and indicate a linear relationship between memory and visual set size and search time. However, if this linear relationship were applied to larger visual and memory set sizes, it would lead to prohibitively long search times. In several experiments, participants memorized 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, or 100 items and searched for them in displays containing 1-16 items.
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Learning the Wrong Lessons
Inside Higher Ed: Here is the lesson people want to learn from the Penn State scandal: There are some smarmy folks out there who, through a combination of mindless groupthink and fear of antagonizing important people, will do unimaginable things, like not reporting child abusers to the police; perhaps there are other "Penn States" out there or possibly there even are people at our own institution who are hiding seriously dirty linen about which we know nothing. The one thing we know for sure is that we never would act the way those people did. That’s the wrong lesson. Here’s why. In the 1960s, the late Stanley Milgram did a series of studies while a faculty member at Yale University.
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Mind games of the victorious
Reuters: For decades after the first sports psychology lab was established in 1920 in Germany, mental coaches have been the water boys of sports science, viewed by their colleagues as not quite good enough to make the first-string team. That has changed. Virtually every top professional team and elite athlete has a psychologist on speed dial for help conquering the yips - when stress makes crucial muscles jerk and ruins, say, an archery shot - marshal the power of visualization, or just muster the confidence that can mean the difference between medaling or just muddling through.
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Helping others can give you free time: study
New Zealand Herald: If you're always feeling there aren't enough hours in the day, the answer could be to do a favour for someone else, say scientists. Despite the fact it involves giving up some of that precious time, devoting a few hours or even just minutes to others can make us feel as if we actually have more free time, a study claims. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania compared the effects of 'chillaxing', or wasting time, and giving time - for example, writing a letter to a sick child. They found that those who did the latter felt they had more time on their hands, reports the journal Psychological Science. Read the whole story: New Zealand Herald
