Published: October 18, 2011
Image: istockphoto
t’s time for forgetting to get some respect, says Ben Storm, author of a new article on memory in
Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the
Association for Psychological Science. “We need to rethink how we’re talking about forgetting and realize that under some conditions it actually does play an important role in the function of memory,” says Storm, who is a professor at the
University of Illinois at Chicago.
“Memory is difficult. Thinking is difficult,” Storm says. Memories and associations accumulate rapidly. “These things could completely overrun our life and make it impossible to learn and retrieve new things if they were left alone, and could just overpower the rest of memory,” he says.
But, fortunately, that isn’t what happens. “We’re able to get around these strong competing inappropriate memories to remember the ones we want to recall.” Storm and other psychological scientists are trying to understand how our minds select the right things to recall—if someone’s talking about beaches near Omaha, Nebraska, for example, you will naturally suppress any knowledge you’ve collected about Omaha Beach in Normandy. [continue reading…]
Published: October 17, 2011
Does age affect complex decision making, for better or worse? It’s well known that certain abilities decline with advanced age — most notably processing speed — but what about that vast reservoir of decision making experience? Does that count? Does seasoned judgment trump the nimble-mindedness of youth, or the other way around?
What do you think? Wray Herbert takes looks a at What Happens To Our Decision-Making Brain As We Age over at The Huffington Post read more
Wray Herbert is the author of “On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits.” He is an award-winning journalist who has been writing about health and psychology for more than 25 years, including regular columns for Newsweek and Scientific American Mind and his popular blog, We’re Only Human.
Source: Huffington Post
Published: October 17, 2011
In the racy television hit show, Sex and the City, Carrie, one of the main characters tells her best girlfriends that “Men who are too good looking are never good in bed because they never had to be.” This is just one of the many gender stereotypes that audiences were exposed to in this show. The show challenged many stereotypes about sex and gender and refrained from the gender caricatures that typify so much television fare. Now, a new review article written by University of Michigan psychology professor Terri Conley and her team of graduate students – Amy Moors, Jes Matsick, Ali Ziegler and Brandon Valentine – examines how such gender stereotypes fueled the sexual revolution started by women in the 60s, now carried on proudly by Carrie and her gang.
The review article, published in the latest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, challenges the assumptions and myths that people have about sex and the roles that men and women have in the bedroom. According to the authors, “the take home message of our review article is that people should not take gender differences in sexuality at face value.” [continue reading…]
Published: October 13, 2011
Image: Norma Desmond
is normally diagnosed between the ages of 2 and 3. But new research is finding symptoms of autism spectrum disorders in babies as young as 12 months. If children could be diagnosed earlier, it might be possible to help them earlier—and maybe even stop them from developing autism, according to the author of a new paper published in
Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the
Association for Psychological Science.
“In the field, there’s this new excitement,” says Brooke Ingersoll of Michigan State University. “We’re starting to get a picture of what autism looks like in the first years of life.” Because autism normally isn’t diagnosed until a child starts to show delays in talking and other milestones that typically occur after age 2, it’s been difficult to look at what children are like in the first years of life. Until recently, psychological scientists have only been able to learn about the children’s behavior as an infant and toddler by asking their parents, and sometimes looking at home movies. [continue reading…]
