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Learning With Amnesia
Actors are a group of people rife for research opportunities because their profession requires that they remember vast amounts of ever-changing information — and recite that information at a moment’s notice. In a recent study in the journal Cortex, researchers Michael Kopelman (Kings College London) and John Morton (University College London) used the unique experiences of an actor with amnesia to better understand learning in individuals affected by the syndrome. In the past 15 years, several studies have examined the impact of hippocampal and medial temporal damage on the learning of semantic information — information relating to general facts and meaning.
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Science of Implicit Bias to Be Focus of US Law Enforcement Training
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced this week that it will formally integrate findings from psychological science into new training curricula for more than 28,000 DOJ employees as a way of combating implicit bias among law enforcement agents and prosecutors. The training program began rolling out Monday and is expected to continue through 2017. Accumulated evidence from decades of psychological research has shown that even when individuals do not show outward bias toward individuals from certain groups, they often show evidence of implicit bias – or bias that influences behavior in subtle ways that operate outside of conscious awareness.
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NIH Simplifies IRB Procedures for Multisite Studies
Multisite research collaborations can lead to significant discoveries, but they are also a challenge for many reasons, including logistical ones. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have introduced a new policy to streamline one aspect of these valuable projects: Now, multisite, NIH-funded studies conducting the same experiment are required to use only a single institutional review board (IRB) to oversee the research. This new policy begins May 25, 2017, and affects NIH-funded multisite studies which intend to use the same experimental protocol.
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How Language ‘Framing’ Influences Decision-Making
The way information is presented, or “framed,” when people are confronted with a situation can influence decision-making.
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How Jerome Bruner Transformed Psychological Science
Legendary APS William James Fellow Jerome Bruner passed away at the age of 100 on June 5, 2016. His groundbreaking contributions to cognitive, educational, and perceptual psychology have had transformative effects on the field as a whole, as well as effects on fields such as anthropology, neuroscience, and linguistics. Often considered a founder of the cognitive revolution, many of Bruner’s ideas seem almost intuitive now, but at the time, they challenged the basic principles of scholarship and education.
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How Collectivism Protects Against Contagious Fear
An outbreak of Ebola in the Republic of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone that began in 2014 made headlines around the world, as the number of individuals affected continued to climb. Ebola is a viral disease that can be transmitted to humans through animal and insect bites, but can also be spread from person to person through bodily fluids. The severity of the outbreak in West Africa, combined with the knowledge that the virus could spread through human contact, led many people in parts of the world that were actually at low risk of an outbreak to express xenophobic attitudes.
