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How Children Learn To Read
The New Yorker: Why is it easy for some people to learn to read, and difficult for others? It’s a tough question with a long history. We know that it’s not just about raw intelligence, nor is it wholly about repetition and dogged persistence. We also know that there are some conditions that, effort aside, can hold a child back. Socioeconomic status, for instance, has been reliably linked to reading achievement. And, regardless of background, children with lower general verbal ability and those who have difficulty with phonetic processing seem to struggle. But what underlies those differences?
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Positive thinking isn’t all-powerful. Penalty for failure may help more in reaching goals.
The Washington Post: It’s that time of year when New Year’s resolutions begin to fade, and even the best-laid plans can become sidetracked as life gets busy. But as psychologists and behavioral economists have found reasons why it’s so easy to let good intentions slide, they’ve also come up with tools to help. As counterintuitive as it may sound, many resolutions fail due to positive thinking, says Gabriele Oettingen, a psychologist at New York University. Her research has shown that optimistic thinking can actually hamper your drive to succeed. ... “We found that positive dreams and fantasies are not only not helpful, but they might actually hurt,” Oettingen says.
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Brains Make Decisions the Way Alan Turing Cracked Codes
Smithsonian Magazine: Despite the events depicted in The Imitation Game, Alan Turing did not invent the machine that cracked Germany’s codes during World War II—Poland did. But the brilliant mathematician did invent something never mentioned in the film: a mathematical tool for judging the reliability of information. His tool sped up the work of deciphering encoded messages using improved versions of the Polish machines. Now researchers studying rhesus monkeys have found that the brain also uses this mathematical tool, not for decoding messages, but for piecing together unreliable evidence to make simple decisions.
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The Internet’s hidden science factory
PBS: In a small apartment in a small town in northeastern Mississippi, Sarah Marshall sits at her computer, clicking bubbles for an online survey, as her 1-year-old son plays nearby. She hasn’t done this exact survey before, but the questions are familiar, and she works fast. That’s because Marshall is what you might call a professional survey-taker. In the past five years, she has completed roughly 20,000 academic surveys. This is her 21st so far this week. And it’s only Tuesday. Marshall is a worker for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online job forum where “requesters” post jobs, and an army of crowdsourced workers complete them, earning fantastically small fees for each task.
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Right Brained, Wrong Brained: How Caltech Neuroscience Became a Buzzfeed Quiz
Los Angeles Magazine: Somewhere between art class and algebra, most of us learn—probably after struggling in one area and excelling in the other—which “side” of our brain is dominant. You are either left brained or right brained. (And if you are in doubt, you can turn to any number of online tests to peg your hemispheric tendencies once and for all.) Left brainers are supposed to be analytical, orderly, mathematical, and good with language. Right brainers tend to be more disorganized, creative, artistic, and visual. A test on BuzzFeed informs me that I’m right brained, though as a science writer, my background would suggest that I draw more from the left.
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Conformity Starts Young
Scientific American: Nobody likes a show-off. So someone with a singular skill will often hide that fact to fit in with a group. A recent study reported for the first time that this behavior begins as early as two years old. In the study, led by a team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and published in Psychological Science, two-year-old children, chimpanzees and orangutans dropped a ball into a box divided into three sections, one of which consistently resulted in a reward (chocolate for the children; a peanut for the apes).
