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Spelke Awarded Heineken Prize
APS William James Fellow Elizabeth S. Spelke of Harvard University, a leading psychological scientist and specialist on the cognitive development of infants, recently received the C. L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Sciences from the
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Brain Exercises Don’t Live Up to the Hype, Researchers Say
The Wall Street Journal: Computerized brain-training exercises and games, touted for their ability to improve overall cognitive function, may actually only help you get better at the specific game you’re playing. That’s the conclusion of a wide-ranging review of nearly 400 studies of brain training published last week in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The review found that none of the studies followed scientific best practices for comparing a group of people practicing an intervention against a control group not getting the intervention.
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How ‘Daycare’ Became ‘School’
The Atlantic: Chelsea Clinton made headlines recently as she campaigned for her mother—not for the policy proposals she defended, but for the fact that she did not accompany her not-quite-2-year-old daughter Charlotte to the first day of her Manhattan "school." While detractors were quick to berate her for missing this defining event in her child's life, supporters rushed to her defense by noting that the child’s father, who took Charlotte to school together with the family nanny, is perfectly capable of taking the lead. But what's missing from the discussion is an objection to the controversy’s premise—since when has "school" started at age 2? ...
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Using the Wisdom of Crowds to Improve Hiring
The British statistician Francis Galton applied statistical methods to many different subjects during the 1800s, including the use of fingerprinting for identification, correlational calculus, twins, blood transfusions, criminality, meteorology and, perhaps most famously, human intelligence. Galton, who was an ardent eugenicist, believed that intelligence was a trait that only a minority of elite individuals possessed. The majority of common people, he believed, were not very competent decision-makers. To put his theories to the test, Galton ran a famous experiment designed to analyze whether groups of common people were capable of making accurate choices.
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Police Lineups: The Science of Getting It Right
Discover: One night in 1984, a man broke into Jennifer Thompson’s apartment and raped her at knifepoint. Throughout the attack, the college student memorized every detail of her rapist’s face, promising herself that when she took the witness stand against him, “he was going to rot” in prison. Thompson hurried to police the morning after the attack, giving them a detailed description of her rapist, filling in all the characteristics she’d memorized so carefully. The police put together a photographic lineup – the standard lineup technique in the modern U.S. – and Thompson selected a man named Ronald Junior Cotton. “I had picked the right guy,” she said. “I was sure. I knew it.” ...
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Inside the Psychologist’s Studio with Jennifer A. Richeson
One of the field’s foremost researchers on the psychological phenomena of cultural diversity reflects on her career and her future research plans.
