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Visual System ‘Prioritizes’ Information for Conscious Access
We are continuously flooded with sensory information from our physical environment – the sights, sounds, smells, feel of everything around us. We’re flooded with so much information, in fact, that we’re not consciously aware of much of it. “Considering that people are continuously presented with vast amounts of sensory information, a system is needed to select and prioritize the most relevant information,” Surya Gayet and colleagues write. The researchers surmised that, in the case of vision, visual working memory (VWM) may be that selection system.
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Childhood Poverty Linked With Worse Mental Health in Emerging Adulthood
About 1 in 4 children in the United States spend some or even all of their early childhood in poverty, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. What does this early exposure to poverty mean for mental health outcomes when these children enter their teens and early 20s? Psychological scientists Gary Evans and Rochelle Cassells set out to explore this question, using data from almost 200 participants involved in a longitudinal study of rural poverty, cumulative risk, and child development. As they predicted, participants who spent more time in poverty in early childhood showed signs of worse mental health in emerging adulthood.
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Perspectives Reviews 25 Years of Science
The journal Perspectives on Psychological Science continues to recognize the 25th anniversary of APS by featuring a series of special sections that take a look at how the field has changed over the last 25 years. The special section in the November issue includes articles that explore a wide range of topics, including the science of well-being, the burgeoning field of social neuroscience, advances in research on autism and dyslexia, integrative approaches to understanding the brain on stress, psychological perspectives on cardiovascular diseases, the challenge of examining health disparities, and the development of parent-training programs.
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Advancing Science Through the Use of “New Statistics”
There are several steps that researchers can take to bolster the integrity of their work, but embracing the use of the “new statistics” of effect sizes, estimation, and meta-analysis is a particularly important one, argues psychological scientist Geoff Cumming of La Trobe University in Australia. As Cumming notes in a new tutorial published online in Psychological Science, the critical flaw of the traditional statistical approach – null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST) – is that it disposes scientists to think of their research aims and results in black and white.
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24th Annual Rotman Research Institute Conference
Join world-renowned scientists in Toronto at the 24th annual Baycrest Rotman Research Institute conference titled "Memory and the Brain in Health and Disease”. March 10-11, 2014 at the Omni King Edward Hotel. Post-conference workshops on March 12, 2014 at Baycrest. Full details can be found on the website at research.baycrest.org/conference
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Sleep Unbinds Memories From Their Emotional Context
Many of us might remember our parents insisting that we get a good night’s sleep before a big exam or test, with the argument that being well rested would help us perform at our best. Although we may not have believed our parents back then, perhaps we should have. Research is showing that sleep plays an important role in the stabilization and strengthening of memories. In particular, research has shown that sleep makes memories more resistant to interference from competing lexical information. The authors of a recent article in the journal Cortex wondered if sleep could also protect memories from emotional interference.
