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Taking a Dog’s-Eye View of Social Interaction
As many dog owners will likely attest, dogs appear to have pretty sophisticated social skills. Not only can they learn verbal commands, they can also follow a person’s gaze and respond to nonverbal signals, including pointing. But how do they know when a series of events constitutes a social interaction? To find out whether dogs use contingency as a possible cue, researcher Tibor Tauzin and colleagues tested a group of 60 dogs, all family pets that were included in the Family Dog Research Database at the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. The sample included both purebred and mixed breed dogs, both males and females.
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Teens Who Say No to Social Media
The Wall Street Journal: When 14-year-old Brian O’Neill of Washington, D.C., wanted to find out what his friends had been up to over summer vacation, he did something radical: He asked them. Unlike most kids his age, Brian isn’t on social media. He doesn’t scroll through his friends’ Instagram shots or post his own, nor does he use Facebook or Snapchat. “I don’t need social media to stay in touch,” he says. ... In a study published this spring in the journal Psychological Science, researchers created an Instagram-like program and then used fMRI scans to measure teens’ reactions to the photos that received more or fewer likes.
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What a Bad Decision Looks Like in the Brain
The Atlantic: Humans often make bad decisions. If you like Snickers more than Milky Way, it seems obvious which candy bar you’d pick, given a choice of the two. Traditional economic models follow this logical intuition, suggesting that people assign a value to each choice — say, Snickers: 10, Milky Way: 5 — and select the top scorer. But our decision-making system is subject to glitches. In one recent experiment, Paul Glimcher, a neuroscientist at New York University, and collaborators asked people to choose among a variety of candy bars, including their favorite — say, a Snickers. If offered a Snickers, a Milky Way and an Almond Joy, participants would always choose the Snickers.
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To Seem Better at Your Job, Ignore the Office Dress Code
New York Magazine: Regardless of your office’s dress code, there’s something to be said for showing up at work in a power suit. The clothes, to a certain extent, make the employee: Past research has shown that dressing more formally can help you focus, make you more confident, and even give you an edge in abstract, big-picture thinking. This last one, though, was a relative effect: People who dressed more formally at work became better at thinking abstractly, but only when they were more dressed up than everyone around them.
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Best Friends Build Shared Memory Networks
The Atlantic: I’ve known my two best friends since 9th grade. In that time, a lot has happened, and I’ve forgotten a lot of it. It’s not unusual now for one of them to say “Remember in high school, when this happened?” and for me to reply “Well now I do.” They’re always reminding me of things I’ve forgotten. They’re an extra hard drive for my limited memory capacity. In science, this is known as a transactive memory system. Transactive memory systems (TMS) are repositories of knowledge that are shared between two or more people. A shared memory of events, like with me and my friends, above, can be part of it, but it’s also a way of calling up facts that other people know.
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This audacious study will track 10,000 New Yorkers’ every move for 20 years
Vox: Paul Glimcher is on the verge of launching an absurdly ambitious project in social science. The concept is simple, but the scope is spectacularly broad. Over the next few years, he and his team are going to recruit 10,000 New Yorkers and track everything about them for decades. By everything, I mean full genome data, medical records, diet, credit card transactions, physical activity, personality test scores, intelligence test scores, social interactions, neighborhood characteristics, loan records, time spent on email, educational achievement, employment status, sleep, GPS location data, blood work, and stool samples. And there's so much more.
