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Word Gap? How About Conversation Gap?
The Huffington Post: The Clinton Foundation sponsors an initiative called Too Small to Fail, which aims to help low-income parents better prepare their children for school. Many children who grow up in poverty enter school already far behind, and this achievement gap often persists into adulthood. Much of this achievement gap can be traced back to poor language skills, including stunted vocabulary development -- the so-called "word gap." It's estimated that poor children, by the time they hit kindergarten, have heard 30 million fewer words than their more fortunate classmates.
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Why Babies Love (And Learn From) Magic Tricks
NPR: To survive, we humans need to be able to do a handful of things: breathe, of course. And drink and eat. Those are obvious. We're going to focus now on a less obvious — but no less vital — human function: learning. Because new research out today in the journal Science sheds light on the very building blocks of learning. Imagine an 11-month-old sitting in a high chair opposite a small stage where you might expect, say, a puppet show. Except this is a lab at Johns Hopkins University. Instead of a puppeteer, a researcher is rolling a red and blue striped ball down a ramp, toward a little wall at the bottom.
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Joint NIA-AGS Conference on Sleep: Application Now Available
"Sleep, Circadian Rhythms, and Aging: New Avenues for Improving Brain Health, Physical Health, and Functioning" — the second in a three-part series of U13 Bedside-to-Bench Conferences — will be held October 4–6, 2015, in Bethesda, Maryland. Sponsored by the National Institute on Aging and the American Geriatrics Society, the conference will provide attendees across multiple disciplines with opportunities to learn about cutting-edge research, participate in creating recommendations for future research, and connect with colleagues and leaders in the field. Click here for more information, and submit your application by June 1.
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How Children Develop the Idea of Free Will
The Wall Street Journal: We believe deeply in our own free will. I decide to walk through the doorway and I do, as simple as that. But from a scientific point of view, free will is extremely puzzling. For science, what we do results from the causal chain of events in our brains and minds. Where does free will fit in? But if free will doesn’t exist, why do we believe so strongly that it does? Where does that belief come from? In a new study in the journal Cognition, my colleagues and I tried to find out by looking at what children think about free will. When and how do our ideas about freedom develop? Philosophers point out that there are different versions of free will.
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Shakespeare’s Plays Reveal His Psychological Signature
Shakespeare is such a towering literary figure that any new insight into the man, or his work, tends to generate a jolt of excitement in academic and non-academic communities of Shakespeare aficionados. Applying psychological theory and text-analyzing software, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have discovered a unique psychological profile that characterizes Shakespeare’s established works, and this profile strongly identifies Shakespeare as an author of the long-contested play Double Falsehood. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Study: Your Voice Is The Secret To Getting Hired
Forbes: If you want the job, you better speak up: Your voice carries a personal power that assures people of your intelligence and competence in a way that mere written words can’t. A new study by University of Chicago Booth School of Business researchers, to be published by the Journal of Psychological Science, found that job candidates were more likely to be hired if they make their pitch using their voice rather than text. ... The Booth School researchers, Professor Nicholas Epley and Ph.D. candidate Juliana Schroeder, asked recruiters and hypothetical employers to rate candidates on their qualifications.
