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Toys May Shape Language Development
Yahoo News: Toddlers who play with different-shaped objects learn new words twice as fast as those who play with objects that have similar shapes, a new study finds. University of Iowa researchers worked with 16 children who were 18 months old and knew about 17 object names at the start of the study. Some children were taught the names of objects by playing with toys that were nearly identical, while others played with toys that were significantly different. Read more: Yahoo News
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Het geheim achter voetbalpenalty’s
Metro Nederland: Links of rechts duiken? Dat is de grote vraag en het keuzemoment van keepers als er strafschoppen worden genomen. Maar nu beweert een groep Nederlandse psychologen dat ze een antwoord hebben op deze eeuwige vraag. Uit onderzoek blijkt dat keepers de neiging hebben om in de rechterhoek te duiken wanneer hun team aan de verliezende hand is tijdens een Wereldkampioenschap. De resultaten hiervan worden gepubliceerd in Psychological Science, een belangrijk tijdschrift in de psychologie. Lees meer/Read more: Metro Nederland
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What the Stanford prison experiment taught us — and didn’t teach us — about evil
Boston Globe: Via Longreads, Stanford Magazine has a fascinating piece on the infamous Stanford prison experiment. For those who never took a psychology class, in August of 1971 a psychologist named Phil Zimbardo and his colleagues took a bunch of male college students, divided them into "guards" and "prisoners," stuck them in a fake prison on the Stanford campus, and observed their subsequent interactions.
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Our Brains Have Multiple Mechanisms For Learning
One of the most important things humans do is learning this kind of pattern: when A happens, B follows. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines how people learn, and finds that they use different mental processes in different situations. “There's a long history in the field of psychology of two different approaches to thinking about how we learn,” says James McClelland of Stanford University, who cowrote the paper with graduate student Daniel Sternberg. One is learning by association; Pavlov's dog learned to associate food with the sound of a bell.
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Vokale vermitteln Größe
ORF News Austria: Die Forscher arbeiteten mit 28 Babys im Alter von vier Monaten. Ihre Muttersprache war Spanisch. Sie spielten den Babys Silben vor, die aus Konsonanten und den Vokalen I, O, E oder A zusammengesetzt waren. Bedeutung hatten die Silben keine. Während die Babys eine Silbe hörten, zeigten ihnen die Forscher gleichzeitig mehrere geometrische Figuren. Die Kreise, Ovale, Quadrate und Dreiecke waren unterschiedlich groß und hatten verschiedene Farben. Mit einem sogenannten Eyetracker wurde das Blickverhalten der Babys aufgezeichnet. Hörten die Babys Silben mit den Vokalen I und E, fiel ihr Blick als erstes auf kleinere geometrische Figuren.
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Optimism helps teens tackle anxiety
Times of India: Training teens to develop a positive outlook might help them tackle anxiety effectively as adults, according to a new research. "For example, I might wave at someone I recently met on the other side of the street," says experimental psychologist Jennifer Lau from Oxford University, who led the study. "If they don't wave back, I might think they didn't remember me - or alternatively, I might think they're snubbing me. People with anxiety are more likely to assume the latter interpretation," Lau said Read more: Times of India