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The History of Decision Making
APS Fellow Gerd Gigerenzer is the Director at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany, where he investigates how humans and other animals make decisions and use cognitive strategies when facing uncertainty. The findings are used in training and informing law students, judges, and mangers. Gigerenzer is also the Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany. Watch Gerd Gigerenzer discuss his research on human decision making in this series of interviews.
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Hormonal Contraception Alters Stress Hormone Response
The cameras were rolling at the APS 24th Annual Convention in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Watch as Shawn Nielsen, University of California, Irvine, describes her research. Most people remember emotionally arousing material better than neutral material partly due to the body’s natural stress response. But stress responses in women can vary during their menstrual cycle. Because ovarian sex hormone levels are commonly manipulated via hormonal contraception, Shawn Nielsen and Larry Cahill, at the Cahill Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine, hypothesized that contraceptive use would influence stress/sex hormone interactions and emotional memory.
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Geraldine Dawson – New Directions in Early Detection and Intervention in Autism
Recent prospective studies of infants at risk for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have provided insights into very early development in autism and allowed clinicians to develop new screening tools for identifying infants at risk for ASD. At the same time that early screening tools are being developed, novel approaches to early intervention are being tested with infants at risk for ASD as young as 12 months of age. The hope is that, by intervening very early in life, the course of early brain and behavioral development can be modified and the core symptoms of autism can be significantly reduced, or even prevented in some cases.
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Today’s Spotlight: Robert A. Bjork
Watch APS Past President Robert A. Bjork explain his theory on long-term memory in this series of interviews. Bjork is a Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His lab, the Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab, investigates human learning, memory, and the implications of such research on instruction. Bjork was Co-editor of Psychological Science in the Public Interest. GoCognitive is an educational website supported by the APS Teaching Fund that provides free access to tools on cognitive psychology and neuroscience. GoCognitive has an archive of video interviews of leading researchers in the field, in addition to interactive demonstrations.
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BATMAN Gear for the Real World
The United States Air Force is taking a page from an iconic comic. As an intern in the Human Performance Wing at Wright Paterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, psychological scientist Andre Garcia, from George Mason University, worked on the BATMAN team. Though Garcia tends to think of team BATMAN (which stands for Battlefield Air Targeting Man-Aided kNowledge) as being more like Alfred, Batman’s loyal butler who was always there to help the caped crusader with all of his high-tech gizmos.
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Save the Nerves for the Night Before
Four days left, 4 more psychological science highlights: Counting down to the Olympic Opening Ceremony, with research insights on sports and performance. #4. In Olympic competition, the margin between winning the gold and sitting in the stands often comes down to fractions of a second. Olympic athletes will be doing everything they can to gain even the slightest competitive edge. Researchers have found that feeling tense the night before a game could actually be part of gaining that edge. Recent research conducted at Northwestern University investigated whether feelings of tension play a part in swimming performance.
