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Brain Can Plan Actions Toward Things the Eye Doesn’t See
People can plan strategic movements to several different targets at the same time, even when they see far fewer targets than are actually present, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. A team of researchers at the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario took advantage of a pictorial illusion -- known as the “connectedness illusion” -- that causes people to underestimate the number of targets they see. "The Connectedness Illusion": Connecting the circles creates the illusion of fewer circles on the right.
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Beliefs About Causes of Obesity May Impact Weight, Eating Behavior
People who indicated that diet was the primary cause of obesity actually had lower BMIs than those who implicated lack of exercise.
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People Attribute Minds to Robots, Corpses That Are Targets of Harm
As Descartes famously noted, there’s no way to really know that another person has a mind -- every mind we observe is, in a sense, a mind we create. Now, new research suggests that victimization may be one condition that leads us to perceive minds in others, even in entities we don’t normally think of as having minds. This research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that people attribute minds to entities they perceive as being targets of harm, even when the entity in question is a robot or a corpse.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science and Clinical Psychological Science: Immediate Effect of Internal Reward on Visual Adaptation David Pascucci and Massimo Turatto Can exposure to rewards influence our visual experiences? To answer this question, the authors had participants perform a discrimination task during an adaptation period meant to induce the tilt aftereffect -- a visual illusion in which prolonged exposure to an oriented stimulus affects the perception of subsequent stimuli orientations.
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Humans Get the Gist of Complex Sounds
When faced with many different sounds, such as notes in a violin melody, the brain quickly summarizes individual pitches to get an overall gist of what is being heard.
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People Anticipate Others’ Genuine Smiles, But Not Polite Smiles
Smile and the world smiles with you -- but new research suggests that not all smiles are created equal. The research shows that people actually anticipate smiles that are genuine but not smiles that are merely polite. The differing responses may reflect the unique social value of genuine smiles. “These findings give us the first clear suggestion that the basic processes that guide responses to reward also play a role in guiding social behavior on a moment-to-moment basis during interactions,” explains psychological scientist and lead researcher Erin Heerey of Bangor University (UK).