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Toddlers and Touchscreens: A Science in Development
In the last decade, smartphones and tablets have gone from being rare luxury devices to essential components of everyday life: Results of a recent survey show, for example, that family ownership of touchscreens in the UK increased from 7% in 2011 to 71% in 2014 (Ofcom, 2014). APS Board Member Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Tim Smith, psychological scientists at Birkbeck, University of London, want to know how this rise in digital technology may be affecting early child development.
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Brain Activity of Passengers on Terrifying Flight Sheds Light on Trauma Memory
Neuroimaging data collected from a group of passengers who thought they were going to die when their plane ran out of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 2001 are helping psychology researchers better understand trauma memories and how they're processed in the brain. A total of eight passengers agreed to undergo fMRI scanning while they looked at video recreation of the Air Transat incident, footage of the 9/11 attacks, and a neutral event. The participants ranged in age from 30s to 60s; while some had a diagnosis of PTSD, most did not. “This traumatic incident still haunts passengers regardless of whether they have PTSD or not.
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APS Commits to Promoting Transparent Science
Conducting research in a transparent, open, and reproducible way is essential to achieving credible results that advance knowledge in any scientific discipline. Yet, there is no set of organized rules that defines and encourages such open and transparent practices.
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Shoham Honored Posthumously for Contributions to Family Research
Late APS Board Member Varda Shoham was recognized posthumously as a recipient of the Distinguished Contributions to Family Systems Research Award at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA). Her husband Michael Rohrbaugh, a clinical professor of psychology and psychiatry at George Washington University, shared the award with Shoham.
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How Did Humans Learn to Count? Baboons May Offer Clues
Learning to count comes early in life for humans. Most kids know how to count before they enter formal schooling and the ability to understand basic quantities is fundamental to everyday life. Researchers at the University of Rochester wanted to know whether the cognitive underpinnings for this important ability might be found in some of our close cousins: baboons. "Nonhuman animals do not use words like one, two, and three, or numerals like 1, 2, and 3, to “count” in the way that humans do. Nonetheless, it is well established that monkeys and other animals can approximate quantities without these symbolic labels," researcher Jessica Cantlon and colleagues write.
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Intuition and Cooperative Decision Making Focus of APS Registered Replication Report Project
Editors of Perspectives on Psychological Science are now accepting proposals from researchers who would like to participate in a new Registered Replication Report (RRR) designed to replicate a 2012 experiment on cooperation and selfishness in economic decision making. The experiment, conducted by David G. Rand, Joshua D. Greene, and Martin A. Nowak, explored the hypothesis that people will be more likely to cooperate when they have to make quick, intuitive decisions.
