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Combatting Toxic Stress with Science
... Issues arise when the body fails to control the on–off switch, says Wendy Berry Mendes, a psychologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Stress becomes problematic if the body overreacts to situations that are not life-threatening, anticipates a stressor too soon or dwells on negative feelings after the stressor has passed — or if a source of stress sticks around for too long. When cortisol and the sympathetic nervous system are dialled up for extended periods, good stress can turn bad. But how would someone know when the line is crossed? ...
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Researchers Identify Four Autism Subtypes with Distinct Genes and Traits
... When genetic sequencing of the human genome began in earnest in the 1990s, autism researchers hoped to identify the genetic cause—or more likely, causes—of the condition. “Twenty years ago the geneticists were saying, ‘We’re not even going to need autism [as a diagnosis]; we’re just going to have genetically defined disorders,’” says Catherine Lord, a psychologist specializing in autism at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Time Warped: How Repetition Distorts Our Sense of Duration
Podcast: This guest’s research uncovers a surprising illusion: Repeated experiences, which are more vividly remembered, are often perceived as having occurred further in the past than they did.
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Teresa Bajo Receives Prestigious Award From Psychonomic Society
APS Board Member Teresa Bajo has been honored with the Psychonomic Society’s Clifford T. Morgan Distinguished Leadership Award, which recognizes individuals for their significant contributions to the field of cognitive psychology.
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Why Memory Fails Us
Human sensory systems are almost as good as they can get, but memory is pretty fallible. We often misremember or downright can't remember. Ours can't hold a candle to artificial memory. But, there are plus sides to this, related to creativity, as explained by Auckland University Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Anthony Lambert.
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Scientists Use A.I. to Mimic the Mind, Warts and All
Companies like OpenAI and Meta are in a race to make something they like to call artificial general intelligence. But for all the money being spent on it, A.G.I. has no settled definition. It’s more of an aspiration to create something indistinguishable from the human mind. ... Some experts gave Centaur high marks. “It’s pretty impressive,” said Russ Poldrack, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University who was not involved in the study. “This is really the first model that can do all these types of tasks in a way that’s just like a human subject.” Ilia Sucholutsky, a computer scientist at New York University, was struck by how well Centaur performed.
