Get smarter fast! This message sounds like the tagline of a late-night infomercial. But when it comes from the mouth of cognitive psychologist John Jonides of the University of Michigan, it carries more weight. In his William James Fellow Award address at the 2011 APS Convention, Jonides described how proper More
Hardly a minute goes by in our lives when we don’t make them. Decisions can be as small as our choices of words or what to have for lunch, and they can be as big as how to plan for retirement or what treatment to choose for a disease. They More
New Zealand Herald: Pregnant women have long complained that their baby bump makes them forgetful. Now a researcher has claimed there may be scientific truth in this ‘baby brain’ syndrome – and that there is a very good reason why expectant mothers develop short-term memory loss. The suggestion is that More
Before working with Jean Piaget, Annette Karmiloff-Smith was a conference interpreter who thought psychology was just about reaction time and questionnaires. “Piaget made me discover that [psychology] was about everything from logic to epistemology, philosophy, science, and absolutely every topic seemed to come into psychology,” says Karmiloff-Smith. “I got really More
Aalto University, Finland http://users.utu.fi/latanu What does your research focus on? I study the brain basis of emotions and social cognition. Using the multimodal brain-imaging approach, I aim to understand the neural circuitry that enables us to navigate the social and physical world unharmed. In particular, I am interested in how More
Columbia University, USA http://www.needlab.cumc.columbia.edu/ What does your research focus on? I study socioeconomic disparities in children’s neurocognitive development. Specifically, we’ve known for decades that there are broad differences in children’s cognitive development and academic achievement as a function of socioeconomic status, or SES. But while classic measures of academic achievement More
