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Hacking Memory to Follow Through with Intentions
Linking tasks that we intend to complete to distinctive cues that we’ll encounter at the right place and the right time may help us remember to follow through.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: From Creatures of Habit to Goal-Directed Learners: Tracking the Developmental Emergence of Model-Based Reinforcement Learning Johannes H. Decker, A. Ross Otto, Nathaniel D. Daw, Catherine A. Hartley In making decisions, people may engage in deliberate processing that draws on existing cognitive models or more automatic processing that relies on reward-based feedback. Adults can toggle between these slow and fast strategies, but the developmental trajectory of such decision making is unknown.
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Complain All You Want, But Your Busy Schedule May Help Your Brain
NPR: Single mothers, untenured professors, young reporters and on-call doctors might have a thin silver lining for their hurried days and response for the people who insist on slowing down: All that hustling may translate into superior brain power as you get older, as a study finds that the busiest people perform best on cognitive tests. Sara Festini, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas, Dallas, and her adviser, Denise Park, published the study in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience on Tuesday. They tested over 300 people between the ages of 50 and 89 on cognitive functions including memory, reasoning and mental quickness. ...
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The empty brain
aeon: No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’. Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused.
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Baby Boomers Are Isolating Themselves as They Age
TIME: A large body of research shows that emotional experience improves with age. People are slower to show anger and more prone to see silver linings. They solve emotionally charged conflicts more effectively and are more likely to forgive and forget. So the prospect of millions of baby boomers entering a stage in life that brings wisdom and emotional balance has many researchers excited about the possibility that they will, as they enter their final years, build a better world.
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Rise in Reporting p-Values as “Marginally Significant”
A researcher collects data, runs a statistical test, and finds that the p value is approximately .07. What happens next? According to a study conducted by Laura Pritschet (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Derek Powell (University of California, Los Angeles), and Zachary Horne (also at the University of Illinois), that researcher may be likely to report that result as “marginally significant” -- not quite significant, but getting there. While it may be common, Pritschet and colleagues argue that this practice is “rooted in serious statistical misconceptions” and is likely to lead to false-positive errors (and sometimes false negatives, too).
