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Meet Your Brain
In December, 2.4 millions viewers watched APS Fellow Bruce Hood deliver the Royal Institution of Great Britain Christmas Lectures. The lectures were started in 1825 and target a teenage audience. They have been delivered by prominent scientists including David Attenborough and Richard Dawkins. Hood’s three-part lecture series, entitled “Meet Your Brain,” explores how the human brain functions, interprets the outside world, and guides social interaction. The first lecture, “What’s in your head?” explains how the human brain constructs its own version of reality. In this clip about how the eyes and the brain work together, Hood makes some surprising observations about human vision.
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What Your Eyes Say About Who You Are
TIME: As you read these words, try paying attention to something you usually never notice: the movements of your eyes. While you scan these lines of text, or glance at that ad over there or look up from the screen at the room beyond, your eyes are making tiny movements, called saccades, and brief pauses, called fixations. Scientists are discovering that eye movement patterns — where we look, and for how long — reveals important information about how we read, how we learn and even what kind of people we are. Read the full story: TIME
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Écrire pour perdre du poids
Le Figaro: Une chercheuse de l'université de Waterloo, au Canada, a fait maigrir des étudiantes en leur demandant d'écrire sur elles-mêmes. Ici, pas d'angoisse de la page blanche, pas de longues stations debout devant un pupitre haut, pas d'espoir non plus de devenir un écrivain reconnu au fruit de longs efforts. En revanche, écrire sous certaines conditions peut aider, sans vraiment s'en rendre compte, à perdre du poids. C'est l'incroyable résultat auquel est parvenue une équipe dirigée par Christine Logel, de l'université de Waterloo (Canada).
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Confidence Matters Just as Much as Ability
Huffington Post: A bulk of research shows that when people are put in situations where they are expected to fail, their performance does plummet. They turn into different people. Their head literally shuts down, and they end up confirming the expectations. When they're expected to win, their performance shoots back up. Same person, difference expectations. In recent years, this phenomenon has been studied in a variety of high-stakes testing situations. One area that has received a lot of attention is in the domain of mental rotation. Out of all the gender differences in cognition that have been reported in psychological literature, 3D mental rotation ability takes the cake.
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Testing Creativity
Widow. Bite. Monkey. What word goes with these three words? This is the kind of question that is asked on the Remote Associates Test, which psychologists use to study creativity. In a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists took a closer look at the test to see why people go wrong. (The answer to that question is coming soon, so think about it now.) People who have an easier time coming up with answers in the Remote Associates Test, or RAT, are generally more creative.
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A Gender-Biased Metric Guides Funding Decisions in Psychology Research
How do psychologists gauge scientific impact? One way is the so-called “journal impact factor,” or JIF, a ranking of a journal derived from the number of citations by other authors to all of the articles it has published in a given year. But JIF isn’t just a statistical abstraction. “JIFs are increasingly used to assess and predict the merits of academic work,” which leads to decisions about hiring, promotion, and the allocation of scarce resources to researchers, says University of Surrey psychologist Peter Hegarty. Needless to say, such a consequential measure must be as fair as possible.
