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Meditation May Help Us Cut Our Losses
There are certain things that are notoriously hard for us to do: Leaving the theater halfway through a terrible movie, deciding to quit a craft project that doesn't look like it ought to, pushing away a less-than-exciting home-cooked meal. We have a hard time doing these things thanks to what researchers call the “sunk cost” bias: We feel compelled to continue with something just because we've already invested money, time, and/or effort into it. In these cases, we aren't rewarded for our perseverance -- the movie will still be bad, the craft project will still be sad-looking, and the food will still taste bland.
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Register Online for the 2014 AAAS Meeting in Chicago
Registration for the 2014 AAAS Meeting, to be held February 13–17, 2014, in Chicago, is now open. Online press registration is available until January 22, 2014. The conference will include more than 160 symposia, seminars, and lectures focused on cutting-edge research from leading scientists.
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Prosocial Media Linked With Empathy Across Cultures
Media and video games that portray cooperation and caring have a positive influence on behavior, a cross-cultural study shows.
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Exploring the Space-Time Continuum…in the Mind
We often use words related to space to talk about time, describing the order of events in terms of “moving forward,” “looking back,” “thinking ahead,” and “lagging behind.” In fact, research suggests that people typically think about events on a timeline that right from left (past) to right (future). But is the ability to mentally represent space necessary for representing events on a mental timeline? Researcher Lera Boroditsky and colleagues decided to investigate this question by looking at mental representation of time in participants who had suffered strokes to the right hemisphere of the brain.
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Stimulating Integrative Research in Computational Cognition
The National Science Foundation is seeking proposals that will result in “encouraging active dialogue across the cognitive and computational communities, facilitating bidirectional cross-fertilization of ideas, and nurturing emerging areas of transdisciplinary research.” This is not a new program or solicitation. For more information, read the Dear Colleagues Letter on the NSF website.
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Alcohol Dampens Stress Responses, Especially for Uncertain Threats
Whether it's a glass of wine, a pint of beer, or a tumbler of whiskey, people often turn to alcohol to calm their nerves. Anecdotally, alcohol does seem to help dampen our stress response, but the specifics of how, when, and for whom this stress reduction actually occurs remains unclear. Researchers John Curtin, Daniel Bradford, and Benjamin Shapiro of the University of Wisconsin-Madison wanted to better understand the mechanisms and boundary conditions that contribute to the stress-dampening properties of alcohol. In particular, they wanted to explore how alcohol influences our responses to threats of varying certainty and severity.
