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Cognitive Skills Peak at Different Ages Across Adulthood
Overall fluid intelligence — the ability to analyze information, engage in critical thinking, and solve problems — is thought to peak in early adulthood, but a new study suggests that different aspects of fluid intelligence peak at
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New Research in Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Anticipatory Control Through Associative Learning of Subliminal Relations: Invisible May Be Better Than Visible Ausaf A. Farooqui and Tom Manly In this study, the researchers examined whether information presented in subliminal cues could be used to proactively enhance goal-directed cognitive control. In a series of 10 experiments, the researchers had participants perform two different tasks. The task that participants were asked to perform could change from one trial to the next.
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The Perils of Adolescence
The Huffington Post: Adolescence is a perilous time of life. It's a time of heightened risk taking -- reckless driving, risky sex, excessive drug and alcohol use. For decades the prevalent view -- the common wisdom of parenting manuals -- was that teenagers feel invulnerable, immortal. They simply perceive less peril in dicey situations and believe they have much more control than they actually do. In short, they underestimate life's very real risks and dangers. But scientists who study adolescent decision making now dispute this common parenting wisdom. Teenagers do indeed underestimate risk -- sometimes -- but at other times they overestimate how risky and harmful a situation is.
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Problems Too Disgusting to Solve
The New Yorker: Early last month, Bill Gates released a video of one of the latest ventures funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: the Omniprocessor, a Seattle-based processing plant that burns sewage to make clean drinking water. In the video, Gates raises a glass of water to his lips. Just five minutes ago, the caption explains, that water was human waste. Gates takes a sip. “It’s water,” he says. “Having studied the engineering behind it,” he writes, on the foundation’s blog, “I would happily drink it every day.
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What Children Think of the Internet (and Why It Matters)
The New York Times: On a recent late afternoon, my 5-year-old son requested pizza for dinner, as he does pretty much every day. I wasn’t sure if we had one in the freezer. “Let’s ask the Internet,” he suggested. A few days later, he proposed consulting Google to find out what time his father would be home from work. Online information sources have become so ubiquitous in our children’s lives that these suggestions, while amusing, aren’t that surprising. But they raise a question: What do children, especially young children who are just starting to make sense of the world, think about the Internet — what it’s for, where the information comes from, how reliable it is?
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Could Virtual-Reality Headsets Like the Oculus Rift Reduce Neck Pain?
New York Magazine: Pain is tricky. At its most basic level, it's our body's way of alerting us to possible danger to our well-being, but all sorts of sensory and psychological cues can make pain feel more or less intense. It's a prime example of how complicated the mind-body connection can be, and people who suffer from chronic pain — that is, folks for whom the pain is not providing any useful information — are constantly searching for ways to relieve it. In a new paper in Psychological Science, researchers took advantage of some of this mind-body weirdness to point to a surprising potential way to reduce chronic pain.
