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How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete
Deb Roy and Rupal Patel pulled into their driveway on a fine July day in 2005 with the beaming smiles and sleep-deprived glow common to all first-time parents. Pausing in the hallway of their Boston home for Grandpa to snap a photo, they chattered happily over the precious newborn son swaddled between them. This normal-looking suburban couple weren’t exactly like other parents. Roy was an AI and robotics expert at MIT, Patel an eminent speech and language specialist at nearby Northeastern University. For years, they had been planning to amass the most extensive home-video collection ever. From the ceiling in the hallway blinked two discreet black dots, each the size of a coin.
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Spot Fake News By Making It
NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with Sander van der Linden of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab about his online game which tries to teach players about fake news by making them produce it. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Here's a novel way to fight the spread of fake news. Try spreading it yourself - not in real life, though - but an online game called "Bad News" where you play the role of a fake news creator trying to get as many followers as you can by disseminating misinformation. Sander van der Linden is the director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab. He's one of the brains behind the game. And thank you for joining us. SANDER VAN DER LINDEN: Pleasure to be on the show.
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Behavioral Strategies More Effective Than Persuasion in Promoting Vaccination
A report in Psychological Science in the Public Interest identifies the most effective ways to increase vaccination rates.
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People Start Caring About Their Reputations In Kindergarten
In today’s social-media-dominated culture, adults spend a lot of time crafting and curating their reputations, virtually and offline. New research suggests that children do the same thing in real life, too — potentially as early as age 5. “Up until pretty recently, the consensus view in psychology was that these kind of social calculations were too complex for young children to engage in,” says Ike Silver, a marketing doctoral student at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, who co-authored a new review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences with Alex Shaw, an assistant professor of developmental psychology at the University of Chicago.
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Crickets And Cannibals: Unpacking The Complicated Emotion Of Disgust
It's 3 a.m. You wake up abruptly with a bad case of dry mouth. You drag yourself out of bed and begin fumbling in the dark to get a glass of water. You flip on the light switch, and there it is — a brown flash. A cockroach skitters across the counter. Did reading this disgust you? It may seem instinctive to recoil in horror after seeing a roach in your kitchen. But psychologist Rachel Herz argues that it's not. "Disgust is the instinct that has to be learned," she says. "Young children are not very good at recognizing disgust faces.
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Kids Draw Female Scientists More Often Than They Did Decades Ago
When asked to draw a scientist, children often reproduce common stereotypes about who scientists are and what they do. However, new research, which I led, shows that these stereotypes have changed over time, at least within the United States. My study, which was published March 20 in Child Development, finds that U.S. children now draw female scientists more often than ever before. In the 1960s and 1970s, one landmark study asked nearly 5,000 elementary school children to draw a scientist. Their artwork almost exclusively depicted men, often with lab coats, working indoors with lab equipment. Of those nearly 5,000 drawings, only 28 depicted a female scientist, which were all drawn by girls.
