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New Research From Psychological Science
Independent Allocation of Attention to Eye and Hand Targets in Coordinated Eye-Hand Movements Donatas Jonikatis and Heiner Deubel When a person reaches for an object, he or she will often look where they reach. But which requires more attention, the hand or the eye movements? Researchers conducted a series of experiments in which participants made simultaneous hand and eye movements to separate locations. The participants were able to allocate their attention equally to both locations, which suggests that even though hand and eye movements are connected, attention limits do not constrain the selection of targets for hand and eye movements.
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Why Arguing Improves Students’ Reasoning Skills
TIME: American educators agreed last year that argumentative reasoning should be taught in schools when those in most states adopted the new Common Core State Standards, a state-led effort to establish educational benchmarks to prepare kindergarten through 12th grade students for college and career. Reaching a similar consensus on how to teach the art of arguing, however, hasn't been as easy. But a new study published in the journal Psychological Science could offer a solution in the form of dialogue. Researchers Deanna Kuhn and Amanda Crowell created a new curriculum for teaching reasoning skills that emphasized discussion and tested it on 48 sixth graders.
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Social Science Palooza II
The New York Times: The nice thing about being human is that you never need to feel lonely. Human beings are engaged every second in all sorts of silent conversations — with the living and the dead, the near and the far. Researchers have been looking into these subtle paraconversations, and in this column I’m going to pile up a sampling of their recent findings. For example, Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim wrote a fantastic book excerpt in Sports Illustrated explaining home-field advantage. Home teams win more than visiting teams in just about every sport, and the advantage is astoundingly stable over time. So what explains the phenomenon? Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Are the Wealthiest Countries the Smartest Countries?
It's not just how free the market is. Some economists are looking at another factor that determines how much a country's economy flourishes: how smart its people are. For a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers analyzed test scores from 90 countries and found that the intelligence of the people, particularly the smartest 5 percent, made a big contribution to the strength of their economies. In the last 50 years or so, economists have started taking an interest in the value of human capital. That means all of the qualities of the people who make up the workforce.
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Mind Reading: How Our Brains Predispose Us to Believe in God
TIME: Psychologist Jesse Bering is best known for his often risqué (and sometimes NSFW) Bering in Mind blog for Scientific American, which examines human behavior — frequently of the sexual sort. But he's also the director of the Institute for Cognition and Culture at Queen's University in Belfast and his new book, The Belief Instinct, examines an entirely different subject: why our brains may be adapted to believe in gods, souls and ghosts. How do you go from writing about sex to writing about religion? Morality is probably the common denominator. What does "theory of mind" — the ability to understand that other people have intentions and perspectives — have to do with believing in God?
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Depressed Moms’ Parenting Style Linked to Toddler Stress
LiveScience: Preschoolers whose parents are depressed get stressed out more easily than kids with healthy parents, but only if their mothers have a negative parenting style, according to a new study. The research, set to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, measured the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in kids' saliva after mildly stressful experiences, such as interacting with a stranger. The researchers found that cortisol spikes were more extreme in kids whose parents had a history of depression and also exhibited a critical, easily frustrated parenting style.
