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How to vote for president when you don’t like any of the candidates
The Washington Post: How do voters select a candidate when no one they like is on the ballot? Behavioral scientists have studied decision-making — including voting — for decades. However, researchers usually give respondents at least one appealing option to choose from. This led us to wonder: What do voters do when they consider all of the options bad? Do they fall back on party affiliation, or simply toss a coin? This question is especially appropriate in the current presidential election because the two front-runners have the lowest favorability ratings ever. Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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‘Brain-training’ games help you play said games, not much else
Chicago Tribune: Spend enough time playing "brain-training" games, and you'll get pretty good at games. But you won't necessarily get better at anything else. That's the conclusion of an extensive review published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest this week. A team of psychologists scoured the scientific literature for studies held up by brain-training proponents as evidence that the technique works - and found the research wanting. Read the whole story: Chicago Tribune
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Some Brains Have a Motion Blind Spot
A surprisingly high proportion of people may have a form of motion blindness in which sensory information about moving objects is not properly interpreted by the brain.
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When a Spouse Dies, Resilience Can Be Uneven
The New York Times: Losing a beloved life partner is never easy at any age, no matter the circumstance. The loss can be sudden and totally unexpected — a fatal heart attack, traffic accident or natural tragedy like a flood or earthquake. Or the loss can be long in coming from a progressive illness that gives the surviving spouse weeks, months, even years to prepare for and presumably ”adjust” to its eventual inevitability.
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Brain Game Claims Fail A Big Scientific Test
NPR: Want to be smarter? More focused? Free of memory problems as you age? If so, don't count on brain games to help you. That's the conclusion of an exhaustive evaluation of the scientific literature on brain training games and programs. It was published Monday in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. "It's disappointing that the evidence isn't stronger," says Daniel Simons, an author of the article and a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "It would be really nice if you could play some games and have it radically change your cognitive abilities," Simons says.
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Believing That Others Understand Helps Us Feel That We Do, Too
Our sense of what we know about something is increased when we learn that others around us understand it, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings are consistent with the idea of a “community of knowledge” in which people implicitly rely on others to harbor needed expertise. Otherwise everyone would have to be omniscient to get by. “We think collaboratively,” said lead author Steven Sloman, professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University. “It implies that people have to live in communities in order to succeed, in order to really make use of our mental capabilities.
