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Math Creating a Division
Quick: What’s 136 divided by 17? Knowing the answer to division problems like this could help the whole country. Over the past 30 years, mathematics achievement of U.S. high school students has remained stagnant—and significantly behind many other countries, including China, Japan, Finland, the Netherlands, and Canada. Robert Siegler and his research team at Carnegie Mellon University has identified that US students' inadequate knowledge of fractions and division is one of the major sources for this gap.
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Don’t Freak Out on Friday the 13th: Stay Positive
It’s Friday the 13th for the second time in 2012. With one more Friday the 13th coming in July, for some superstitious people this is a scary time—but stay positive. Check out this TED talk from APS Fellow and Charter Member Martin Seligman, a leader in the field of Positive Psychology. Seligman runs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. APS Fellow David Myers of Hope College agrees. He says people are much happier than we think they are. And the good news is, we’re not born afraid of things – so maybe we can learn to overcome these fears.
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Cultural Ties
When a child learns to tie her shoes —perhaps using the “bunny ears” method or the “squirrel and the tree” — her parents probably don’t think of the lesson as a moment of cultural reinforcement. But in the midst of a debate over culture and cognition, a group of five psychological scientists at Northwestern University’s MOSAIC lab noticed their shoe-tying methods were as diverse as the countries they represented. The lesson: Culture permeates nearly everything we do, even mundane routines that we think are neutral. For more on culture and science, read the April 2012 Presidential Column Everything is Cultural by APS President Douglas L. Medin.
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Crisscrossing Senses
Ever wonder what the number 5 tastes like? What color is G sharp? Or what type of personality does January have? If you were a synesthete, you might be able to answer these questions. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. More recently, scientists have speculated that babies are born synaesthetes and slowly lose those sensory connections as neurons are pruned as their brains develop. A recent article from Psychological Science Synaesthetic Associations Decrease During Infancy, provides some evidence for this theory.
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Driving Home the Point
When Haneen Saqer, Ewart de Visser, and Jonathan Strohl arrived at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia to talk about the perils of distracted driving, they thought they would be addressing a group of 100 students. Instead, they faced an auditorium of 700 students along with reporters from ABC News and NPR. After all, the trio — who are members of the George Mason University student group Distractions n' Driving (DnD) — had just come to share their graduate research in Human Factors and Applied Cognition. Watch coverage of the program from this ABC 7 News Clip: “We were a bit overwhelmed, but we were prepared,” de Visser says. “The kids really liked it because it was very engaging.
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Comfort or Food? This Harlow Love Song Has the Answer
Harry Harlow conducted his famous experiments on maternal separation and social isolation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1950s and 1960s. Decades later, Brad Wray and his independent study students from Arundel High School in Maryland have set one of those experiments to music. Harlow took baby monkeys from their mothers and placed them with two “surrogate” mothers: one made of wire that dispensed milk and one made of terry cloth that didn’t dispense milk. The song, set to the tune of Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours,” tells how the baby monkeys had to make a choice.
