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Four APS Fellows Elected to the National Academy of Sciences
Yesterday, the National Academy of Sciences announced the election of 84 new members and 21 new foreign associates. APS Fellow Uta Frith, University College, London, UK and University of Aarhus, Denmark, was honored as a foreign associate. Among the new members were three APS Fellows: Randolph Blake, Vanderbilt University, Carol S. Dweck, Stanford University, and Susan A. Gelman, University of Michigan. Randolph Blake is Centennnial Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. He is best known for his work on vision, including his work on motion perception, perceptual organization, and visual cognition.
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A Psychological Twist in Getting Something for Nothing
The Wall Street Journal: When consumers are offered something for nothing, they generally want to pay anyway. That’s according to a new study and a handful of businesses that say “pay-what-you-want” options for products often drive customers to pay a full price or just skip buying. Why would people act against their own economic interest? To protect self image, researchers say. Consumers “feel bad when they pay less than the ‘appropriate’ price, causing them to pass on the opportunity to purchase the product altogether,” says the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Rapid Thinkers Take Greater Risks
The Atlantic: Pop quiz: do you consider yourself a fast thinker or a slow thinker? Time's up! If you took less than a second to answer that, you might be more of a risk-taker. That's according to new research (via Psychology Today) from a team of Princeton scientists who thought there might be a causal relationship between the speed of a person's thought and their willingness to embrace dangerous behavior, such as illegal drug use and unprotected sex. The researchers, Emily Pronin and Jesse Chandler, ran two tests in a study that appeared this month in Psychological Science. Participants were divided into two groups.
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Busy bodies, healthy minds
Chicago Tribune: Carol Adamitis had a stroke when she was 5 years old. Now, at 65, she is participating in research that annually tests her physical and mental health, examining her dexterity as she places pegs in a board and her memory as she repeats a series of numbers backward and forward. The study, led by professors at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, has found that people who are active are sharper and experience lower rates of Alzheimer's disease. Although Adamitis' arthritis makes exercise more difficult, and the stroke hurt her math skills and memory, her exam results show consistency from year to year. "I'm always glad to know how I did on these tests.
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This Is Your Mind on Music
Music is just sound – structured, organized sound. Yet it has surrounded us, moved us, and echoed in our memories throughout the history of our species. Three of the world’s leading psychologists and neuroscientists in the study of music, and one of the world’s leading musicians, will discuss the psychological systems and “orchestra of brain regions” through which music enriches our lives at the Association for Psychological Science’s 24th annual meeting in Chicago, May 24-27, 2012. Why Our Minds Groove to a Beat Whether it’s reggaeton, house, salsa, or bluegrass, one thing is clear: people love moving to the beat of music.
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Insights From the Youngest Minds
The New York Times: CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Seated in a cheerfully cramped monitoring room at the Harvard University Laboratory for Developmental Studies, Elizabeth S. Spelke, a professor of psychology and a pre-eminent researcher of the basic ingredient list from which all human knowledge is constructed, looked on expectantly as her students prepared a boisterous 8-month-old girl with dark curly hair for the onerous task of watching cartoons. The video clips featured simple Keith Haring-type characters jumping, sliding and dancing from one group to another.
