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Why We Fall Prey to Misinformation
Even when we know better, we often rely on inaccurate or misleading information to make future decisions. A review of scientific research explores the reasons why.
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Sleep Makes Relearning Faster and Longer-Lasting
Sleeping between study sessions may make it easier to recall what you studied and relearn what you forgot, with lasting results.
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Babies’ Spatial Reasoning Predicts Later Math Skills
Spatial reasoning measured in infancy predicts how children do at math at four years of age, according to findings from a longitudinal study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “We’ve provided the earliest documented evidence for a relationship between spatial reasoning and math ability,” says Emory University psychological scientist Stella Lourenco, whose lab conducted the research. “We’ve shown that spatial reasoning beginning early in life, as young as six months of age, predicts both the continuity of this ability and mathematical development.” Emory graduate student Jillian Lauer is co-author of the study.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Reconsidering Temporal Selection in the Attentional Blink Patrick T. Goodbourn, Paolo Martini, Michael Barnett-Cowan, Irina M. Harris, Evan J. Livesey, and Alex O. Holcombe When two stimuli are presented in close succession, people often report the first but fail to report the second. In studies of this phenomenon, which is known as attentional blink, many items are presented in rapid succession and participants are asked to make judgments (presence or absence, report the identity) about two target stimuli (T1 and T2) appearing in the string of items. The time between the presentation of T1 and T2 is called a lag.
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Going the Distance: Babies Reach Farther With Adults Around
Eight-month-old infants are much more likely to reach towards distant toys when an adult is present than when they are by themselves, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings suggest that 8-month-olds understand when they need another person’s help to accomplish a task and act accordingly.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Effect of Relative Encoding on Memory-Based Judgments Marissa A. Sharif and Daniel M. Oppenheimer Some theories of decision making suggest that when people encode a stimulus, they represent where the stimulus lies in a distribution rather than the absolute value of the stimulus. How does this tendency to represent information as relative rather than absolute influence decision making? In several studies, participants -- at two timepoints -- evaluated sound clips, the speed of toy cars, or the number of butterflies landing on flowers.