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A brain training exercise that really does work
University of Michigan: ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Forget about working crossword puzzles and listening to Mozart. If you want to improve your ability to reason and solve new problems, just take a few minutes every day to do a maddening little exercise called n-back training.
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CEPEDA: Now whites are feeling discrimination
The Sacramento Bee: Scholars from the Harvard Business School and Tufts University's department of psychology recently confirmed the obvious in contemporary American race relations. The title of their report, "Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing," pretty much says it all. Published late last month in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the report by Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers says whites believe that as bias against blacks decreased in the last six decades, intentional discrimination against whites has increased. Whites now see anti-white bias as a bigger societal problem than anti-black bias.
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Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas
The New York Times: Like any other high school junior, Wynn Haimer has a few holes in his academic game. Graphs and equations, for instance: He gets the idea, fine — one is a linear representation of the other — but making those conversions is often a headache. Or at least it was. For about a month now, Wynn, 17, has been practicing at home using an unusual online program that prompts him to match graphs to equations, dozens upon dozens of them, and fast, often before he has time to work out the correct answer. An equation appears on the screen, and below it three graphs (or vice versa, a graph with three equations).
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Be It Numbers or Words – The Structure of Our Language Remains the Same
It is one of the wonders of language: We cannot possibly anticipate or memorize every potential word, phrase, or sentence. Yet we have no trouble constructing and understanding myriads of novel utterances every day. How do we do it? Linguists say we naturally and unconsciously employ abstract rules—syntax. How abstract is language? What is the nature of these abstract representations? And do the same rules travel among realms of cognition? A new study exploring these questions—by psychologists Christoph Scheepers, Catherine J.
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Using Your Brain to Get Smarter
We may inherit a good deal of our intelligence, but that doesn't mean a person can't get any smarter. That is the upshot of the ongoing cognitive research presented by John Jonides of the University of Michigan during the William James Fellow Award Address this morning at the APS 23rd Annual Convention. "Fluid intelligence is often thought to be highly heritable, and some people draw the conclusion that it is immutable, and I hope to disabuse you of that idea today," Jonides said.
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Do We Dare to Change America’s Diet?
In his Bring the Family Address at the APS 23rd Annual Convention, Kelly D. Brownell of Yale University charged convention-goers to ask themselves whether we have the courage necessary to change America’s diet. Brownell, a psychological scientist and Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, argued that this courage is essential because of the many obstacles – including powerful economic forces – that stand in the way of promoting health in the United States. Over the last 25 years, the rate of obesity has risen dramatically in the United States.
