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Driving May Help Prevent Cognitive Decline
Driving a car is one of the most cognitively complex tasks we engage in on a daily basis. Driving requires an assortment of cognitive skills including executive functioning, information processing, visual processing, and memory. As
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A Cluttered Kitchen Can Nudge Us To Overeat, Study Finds
NPR: Hunger is not the only reason we eat sweets. Often we eat as a way to celebrate, or sometimes we reach for food when we're sad or bored. And a study published this month in the journal Environment and Behavior points to another factor that can nudge us to eat: clutter. "The notion that places — such as cluttered offices or disorganized homes — can be modified to help us control our food intake is becoming an important solution in helping us become more slim by design," report Brian Wansink of Cornell University and his colleagues in their write-up of the study. ... So, how might these findings translate to a messy desk? After all, many of us do a lot of snacking at the office.
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Research Hints at Promise and Difficulty of Helping People With A.D.H.D. Learn
The New York Times: Over the past few decades, cognitive scientists have found that small alterations in how people study can accelerate and deepen learning, improving retention and comprehension in a range of subjects, including math, science and foreign languages. The findings come almost entirely from controlled laboratory experiments of individual students, but they are reliable enough that software developers, government-backed researchers and various other innovators are racing to bring them to classrooms, boardrooms, academies — every real-world constituency, it seems, except one that could benefit most: people with learning disabilities. ... “If anything, for the A.D.H.D.
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Why we never really get over that first love
The Washington Post: Twenty years ago . . . She was my first relationship . . . My first boyfriend . . . I was 17 . . . She was 19 . . . We were crazy about each other . . . We broke up because . . . So much time has passed . . . I find myself thinking of her . . . He keeps appearing in my dreams . . . I’m happily married . . . I’m happily married, BUT . . . I can’t help but wonder . . . We recently reconnected . . . I know I need to move on . . . Please, help . . . What should I do? If you spend enough time reading advice columns, you notice a pattern. In the stream of sorrows and quandaries and relationship angst, one word bubbles up again and again. First. My first love. My first time.
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Six ways your body changes your perception
Science: Can you jump that gap? Will you even try? Your visual system helps you make such decisions by warping and stretching the things you look at according to your physical traits or abilities, says Jessica Witt, a cognitive psychologist at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. Rather than showing us the world as it is, our vision toys with things like slope and distance. The harder a task, the more it seems to magnify before our eyes. These visual biases may have evolved to help us make quick decisions, letting us know at a glance which tasks to tackle.
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People Are Pretty Bad at Reading Faces
The Atlantic: The truth was written all over her face. The eyes are the window to the soul. From our clichés, you would think that we could read faces like they were … well, open books. In fact, the skill has more in common with dancing, or writing confessional poetry: People tend to overestimate their ability to do it. Most of us can’t distinguish between certain expressions without contextual clues. In one study, participants were unable to tell whether faces in photos were showing pain or sexual pleasure about a quarter of the time [1]. In another, when people watched silent videos of the same person experiencing pain and faking pain, they couldn’t tell which was which.
