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There’s Another Big Window for Learning After Childhood
New York Magazine: Children rightly have a reputation for being little knowledge sponges, absorbing all the information that’s around them. But if you happen to not be a child, take heart: There’s new evidence that your brain may be especially teachable later on down the line, too. Such is the lesson of a recent paper lead-authored by University College London cognitive neuroscientist Lisa J. Knoll and highlighted by David Robson at the BPS Research Digest. Published in Psychological Science, the research suggests that teens and even full-blown adults have a shot at learning excellence. Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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Internet Use in Class Tied to Lower Test Scores
Students who surfed the web in a college course had lower scores on the final exam than did those who didn’t go online.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Oxytocin Receptor Gene (OXTR) and Face Recognition Roeland J. Verhallen, Jenny M. Bosten, Patrick T. Goodbourn, Adam J. Lawrance-Owen,Gary Bargary, and J. D. Mollon A recent study by Skuse and colleagues found an association between face recognition and a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) called rs237887 in a group of high-functioning children with autism and their first-degree relatives. In that study, Skuse and colleagues used the Warrington Recognition Memory Test for Faces to examine face recognition.
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The trolley problem: would you kill one person to save many others?
The Guardian: In the 2015 British thriller Eye in the Sky, a military team locates a terrorist cell preparing an attack expected to kill hundreds. They command a drone that can drop a bomb on the terrorists, preventing their attack. As the team readies the bomb, their cameras spy a little girl selling bread within the blast radius. Should they go through with their mission – killing the girl in order to prevent the deaths of many others? This modern-day moral dilemma has its roots in a classic philosophical thought experiment known as the trolley problem.
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How to Soften the Blow of Bad News
The Wall Street Journal: Imagine that you work at an enjoyable, meaningful job with just one catch: Every so often, you have to punch a colleague in the gut. Many American managers experience something similar: In November, U.S. companies laid off more than 26,000 workers, according to consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Most people on the receiving end probably would have preferred the gut punch. There’s no easy way to tell people things that they don’t want to hear. A few core strategies, however, can help messengers deliver bad news in ways that are less stressful to themselves and more comforting to recipients. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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Our growing fascination with boredom
University Affairs: A funny thing happened to Julian Haladyn while researching boredom and art. He got excited. The dull subject was conceptual artist On Kawara’s Today paintings, a series of hundreds of rectangular, solid-coloured canvases – he aimed to make one daily – featuring the day’s date in white. “It was a very boring experience. Your eyes start to glaze over,” says Dr. Haladyn, an OCAD University lecturer, of attending a Kawara exhibition in person. Dr. Haladyn was doing research for his 2012 PhD thesis, and it was during that work that he came across the image of a Kawara painting featuring his birthday – different year, but the right day.
