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Playing Action Video Games Boosts Visual Motor Skill Underlying Driving
Playing action-based video games may boost players’ ability to coordinate incoming visual information with their motor control, a skill critical to many real-world behaviors including driving, new research shows. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our research shows that playing easily accessible action video games for as little as 5 hours can be a cost-effective tool to help people improve essential visuomotor-control skills used for driving,” says researcher Li Li of New York University Shanghai, lead author on the study.
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Building Public Trust in the Police
A comprehensive report examines the psychological research on the factors that drive public trust and law-related behavior.
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Do Monkeys Know When They Don’t Know Something?
Are humans the only animal that knows what they don’t know? A study by researchers at Yale and Harvard shows that rhesus monkeys also spontaneously recognize when they are ignorant and need to seek out more information. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Metacognition— the ability to think about our own thoughts— has long been considered a hallmark of being human,” said Laurie Santos, Yale psychological scientist and senior author of the study. “We all know the difference between feeling like we know something for sure and feeling like we’re not all that certain.
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How We Explain Things Shapes What We Think Is Right
New research focuses on a fundamental human habit: When trying to explain something (why people give roses for Valentine’s Day, for example), we often focus on the traits of the thing itself (roses are pretty) and not its context (advertisers promote roses). In a new study, researchers found that people who tend to focus on “inherent traits” and ignore context also are more likely to assume that the patterns they see around them are good. The findings are forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Heart Rate Variability Moderates the Association Between Separation-Related Psychological Distress and Blood Pressure Reactivity Over Time Kyle J. Bourassa, Karen Hasselmo, and David A. Sbarra Divorce-related stress has been shown to negatively influence later health outcomes. To examine the mechanisms underlying this relationship, researchers measured the respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA; a measure of changes in heart rate during the respiratory cycle) and blood pressure of recently divorced or separated adults while they performed a stressful math task and a divorce-related mental-activation task.
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Children Learn to Take Turns for Mutual Gain
It takes children until they are about 5 years old to learn to take turns with others, while the social skill seems to elude chimpanzees, according to new findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings show that 5-year-old children adopted a turn-taking strategy more effectively than their younger counterparts, suggesting that the skill emerges as children’s cognitive abilities mature.