all Department of Psychology stories

Susan Carey receives David E. Rumelhart Prize

404132862 — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:36:16 -0400

Susan Carey, a Harvard psychologist whose work has explored fundamental issues surrounding the nature of the human mind, has been awarded the 2009 David E. Rumelhart Prize, given annually since 2001 for significant contributions to the theoretical foundation of human cognition.

Carey, the Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is the first woman to receive the prize. Additionally, Carey is the first recipient of the prize for theoretical contributions to the study of human development. Previously, the award was given only for work involved with computational modeling.

Roads not taken disappear more quickly than we realize

404132862 — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:58:59 -0500

Researchers have identified a key reason why people make mistakes when they try to predict what they will like.

According to the findings presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, when predicting how much we will enjoy a future experience, people tend to compare it to its alternatives—that is, to the experiences they had before, might have later, or could have been having now. But when people actually have the experience, they tend not to think about these alternatives and their experience is relatively unaffected by them.

Hauser presents theory of "humaniqueness"

404132862 — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:31:38 -0500

Shedding new light on the great cognitive rift between humans and animals, a Harvard University scientist has synthesized four key differences in human and animal cognition into a hypothesis on what exactly differentiates human and animal thought.

Neuroimaging fails to demonstrate ESP is real

404132862 — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 16:00:49 -0500

Psychologists at Harvard University have developed a new method to study extrasensory perception that, they argue, can resolve the century-old debate over its existence. According to the authors, their study not only illustrates a new method for studying such phenomena, but also provides the strongest evidence yet
obtained against the existence of extrasensory perception, or ESP.

Even in healthy elderly, brain systems become less coordinated

404132862 — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:31:14 -0500

Some brain systems become less coordinated with age even in the absence of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study from Harvard University. The results help to explain why advanced age is often accompanied by a loss of mental agility, even in an otherwise healthy individual.

Steven Pinker’s ‘Ideas on the Fringe’

jake — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:29:15 -0400

Not long ago, Steven Pinker appeared on “The Colbert Report.” He managed to explain the functioning of the human brain to Stephen Colbert in only five words: “Brain cells fire in patterns.”

Tracking down the seat of moral reasoning

404132862 — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:32:04 -0400

Moral philosophers have long grappled with ethical questions, creating hypotheticals that test basic beliefs about right and wrong. For example:

A trolley is running down a track out of control. If it keeps going, it will run over the five unsuspecting people hanging out on the track. You can prevent this disaster by throwing a switch, redirecting the trolley onto a siding where it will kill one person. Do you hit the switch?

Primates expect others to act rationally

50443248 — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:11:22 -0400

When trying to understand someone’s intentions, nonhuman primates expect others to act rationally by performing the most appropriate action allowed by the environment, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard University.

The findings appear in the Sept. 7 issue of the journal Science. The work was led by Justin Wood, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), with David Glynn, a research assistant, and Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard, along with Brenda Phillips of Boston University.

Getting to obesity’s bottom line

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 09:43:20 -0400

Hunter-gatherer instincts set loose in a world of modern food abundance are at the root of today’s obesity crisis, according to a Harvard psychologist.

Deirdre Barrett, psychologist with the Harvard-affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance and assistant clinical professor of psychology in Harvard Medical School’s Psychiatry Department, says food manufacturers and advertising campaigns play to our Paleolithic instincts. They overemphasize the qualities of certain food items that appeal to the hunter-gatherer in us, creating “supernormal stimuli,” cues on an unnatural object that make it more desirable — and harder to resist — than the natural object it mimics.

Children can perform approximate math without arithmetic instruction

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:10:21 -0400

Children are able to solve approximate addition or subtraction problems involving large numbers even before they have been taught arithmetic, according to a study conducted at Harvard University by researchers from the University of Nottingham and Harvard.

Howard Gardner's 'quintet of minds'

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:54:47 -0400

It’s been more than 20 years since Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner offered up a radical idea: that humans possess multiple forms of intelligence rather than just a single type that is easily tested by linguistic and logical-mathematical parameters.

His groundbreaking “Frames of Mind” (1983) changed traditional psychological views of intelligence, and helped educators question conventional teaching and testing.

In a new book this year, Gardner — the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) — goes beyond describing cognition. He ventures into prescription.

Is doing the right thing hard-wired?

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:15:44 -0400

What gives people the ability to tell right from wrong? Is the moral sense instilled in us by God? Is it inculcated through religious training? Or does moral judgment vary according to the culture in which we were raised?

In a talk April 26, psychology professor Marc Hauser argued that our moral sense is part of our evolutionary inheritance. Like the “language instinct” hypothesized by linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky, the capacity for moral judgment is a universal human trait, “relatively immune” to cultural differences. Hauser described it as a “cold calculus,” independent of emotion, whose workings are largely inaccessible to our conscious minds.

Verbal beatings hurt as much as sexual abuse

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:37:29 -0400

Sticks and stones may break my bones,

But names will never hurt me. …

That often repeated children’s rhyme is wrong, according to Harvard University psychiatrists. Scolding, swearing, yelling, blaming, insulting, threatening, ridiculing, demeaning, and criticizing can be as harmful as physical abuse, sexual abuse outside the home, or witnessing physical abuse at home, notes a report in the April issue of the Harvard Mental Health Letter.

Unfeeling moral choices traced to damaged frontal lobes

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:45:32 -0400

Consider the following scenario: Someone you know has AIDS and plans to infect others, some of whom will die. Your only options are to let it happen or to kill the person. Do you pull the trigger?

Most people waver or say they could not, even if they agree that in theory they should. But according to a new study in the journal Nature, subjects with damage to a part of the frontal lobe make a less personal calculation. The logical choice, they say, is to sacrifice one life to save many.

Study shows importance of sleep for optimal memory functioning

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:46:32 -0400

Harvard researchers have tracked fatigue's footsteps on the human brain, showing that sleeplessness impairs the ability to learn new information and that abnormal brain function, not reduced alertness, is the cause.

The study, released in the journal Nature Neuroscience, adds a new wrinkle to the unfolding story of the importance of sleep for memory function and builds on earlier studies that show that sleep deprivation after an event also impairs memory formation.

The study found that student volunteers who had been awake for 35 hours before viewing images performed an average of 19 percent worse remembering those images two days later, after catching up on their sleep.