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Concussion testing for student athletes is common, but some question its worth
The Washington Post: If you have a child playing ice hockey, lacrosse, soccer or football this fall, chances are good he or she has taken a computerized examination called ImPACT, for Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing. About 2 million U.S. athletes of all ages have taken the test, which measures mental abilities such as word and shape recall, reaction time, attention and working memory. Athletes are given a baseline test at the start of a season; those who suffer a concussion are tested again before being allowed to return to play. The increased prevalence of ImPACT reflects growing public unease about the state of our kids’ gray matter.
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Are handsome men never good in bed because they never had to be?
Examiner: A new study from the Association for Psychological Science says that people shouldn't take gender differences in sexuality at face value. To what gender stereotypes do TV shows expose most people? And which shows break the stereotypes? Does a new study from the Association for Psychological Science say in a press release that TV-repeated stereotypes say that good looking people are lousy in the bedroom because they're so attractive they don't have to be good in the bedroom? Or does a new study just look at entertainment's stereotypes of good-looking men in the bedroom? Read the whole story: Examiner
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Babies as young as six months remember more than we thought
The Star-Ledger: What do babies remember? Adults can’t recall their own infant years, so they often assume babies themselves don’t remember much, either. That assumption is wrong, as researchers at Rutgers University continue to prove. Their latest discovery, published in the journal Psychological Science, is that even when babies can’t remember the details of a missing object, they do remember it exists. These littlest study participants can hardly tell anyone this, however. "It’s not easy to study babies and toddlers. They don’t cooperate," says Alan Leslie, director of the university’s Cognitive Development Lab on Busch Campus, Piscataway.
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Forgetting Is Part Of Remembering
It's time for forgetting to get some respect, says Ben Storm, author of a new article on memory in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “We need to rethink how we're talking about forgetting and realize that under some conditions it actually does play an important role in the function of memory,” says Storm, who is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Memory is difficult. Thinking is difficult,” Storm says. Memories and associations accumulate rapidly.
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Learning The Look of Love: That Sly ‘Come Hither’ Stare
Scientific American: While it might not be witchcraft, the formula for ‘love at first sight’ remains a mystery. However, if you pop the following ingredients into a kettle: large pupils, long glances, and a lovely, attentive smile, you may not have concocted a bona fide love potion but your witch’s brew could contain some insight into the laws of attraction. Being an optometrist and all around eye aficionado, I have a deep interest in the connection between the eyes and love.
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Kind Words Can Lead to Harsh Consequences
MSNBC: Politeness has a place, but not in high-stakes situations, according to researchers. Whether a pilot is making an emergency flight or a doctor is trying to help a patient make a surgical decision, the sort of vague, evasive responses that help us avoid hurting someone's feelings can have disastrous consequences, according to a team of scientists, including Jean-François Bonnefon and Wim de Neys of the National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Toulouse in France, and Aidan Feeney of Queen's University in the United Kingdom. The more sensitive an issue, the more polite we tend to become, according to the researchers.
