-
Like Humans, Chimpanzees Know What They Know
Metacognition -- the ability to think about thinking -- is a cognitive skill that we use every day in recognizing what we know, and what we don’t know. Though metacognition was once thought to be a skill unique to humans, a new study published in Psychological Science suggests that chimpanzees may share this ability. Psychological scientist Michael Beran of Georgia State University and colleagues tested metacognition in three language-trained chimpanzees. All three chimpanzees had been trained from an early age to use symbols to request and label objects, actions, locations, and individuals. And they could respond to requests by humans using those symbols.
-
Darby Saxbe
University of Southern California http://dornsife.usc.edu/nestlab What does your research focus on? I am fascinated by how social interconnections, particularly within families, shape our bodies and brains. For example, are spouses’ cortisol levels coordinated? How do early family environments influence youths’ neural and physiological reactivity? Dreaming up lab acronyms may be the academic’s version of doodling your future spouse’s surname in your journal.
-
A Milestone for CPS
April marks a one-year milestone for APS’s newest journal Clinical Psychological Science! CPS provides a venue for cutting-edge research across a wide range of conceptual views, approaches, and topics. Since CPS Editor Alan E. Kazdin, Yale University, and his editorial team started accepting submissions in April 2012, CPS has been making news.
-
Kristen M. Kennedy
The University of Texas at Dallas http://bbs.utdallas.edu/people/detail.php5?i=1061 What does your research focus on? I am most generally interested in brain-behavior relationships as we age, or the cognitive neuroscience of aging. Specifically, I study how changes to the brain’s structure with age correspond to the changes we see in cognition as we age. Interestingly, there is not a one-to-one relationship in this process because our brains are malleable to cope with the biological effects of aging, and our cognitive strategies may also re-arrange to cope with decrements to brain structure.
-
Martin M. Monti
University of California, Los Angeles http://montilab.psych.ucla.edu What does your research focus on? My research focuses on two questions confronting the most characterizing aspects of the human mind: 1) “What is the relationship between language and thought?” and 2) “How and why is consciousness lost and (sometimes) recovered after severe brain injury?” With respect to the first question, I focus on high-level cognition, including arithmetic and music cognition, and logic inference. Does the structure of natural language provide a scaffolding upon which we developed structure-dependent thought in other domains of cognition?
-
Piercarlo Valdesolo
Claremont McKenna College cmcmeatlab.com What does your research focus on? I study the influence of discrete emotions on social and moral judgment, with a particular interest in the adaptive importance of these states. Usually this involves constructing realistic social situations in the lab meant to elicit a particular emotional state from participants, and then measuring its effects on phenomena such as trust, cooperation, altruism, blame, or punishment. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you? I fell into this topic serendipitously.
