Psychological Science Blog

Distracted Driving Laws Don't Stop Crashes (STUDY)

"WASHINGTON -- A new insurance industry study has found that state laws banning the use of handheld devices to make calls or send text messages while driving have not resulted in fewer vehicle crashes."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/30/texting-driving-laws-dont_n_442233.html

How does this make sense knowing what we know about attentional resources?

How can we reconcile these findings when we see numerous examples a driving accidents while texting...

"In 1922, Matthew Luckiesh wrote an optical illusions book titled - Visual Illusions: Their Causes, Characteristics and Applications. It was probably the first book to comprehensively cover the topic of Optical Illusions, or Visual Illusions, as they were called then.

On this optical illusion web site, we present this book to you, chock full of optical illusion information. It will be of interest to both the person who is fascinated by optical illusions and asks, "How do optical illusions work?" and also to the person doing serious research on the science of optical illusions. Some editing of the book has been done."

http://www.visualillusion.net/

Now THAT don't add up!

This is why we make you learn statistics! The pie chart is bad enough, check out the video of newscaster reading off the numbers. Doh!

"Korean scientists have created a domestic robot that cleans up, dumps clothes in the washing machine and even heats food in the microwave."

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2010/01/133_59176.html

Here is the link to the powerpoints I used for the narrative essay response.

http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/hybrid/narrative_essay.pdf

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/

Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.

The research isn't dumbed down, but it's explained in language that everyone can understand, with clear illustrations and references to the original research.

Cognitive Daily is maintained by Dave Munger and Margaret P. Munger.

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/

In one breakthrough example, Ramachandran, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, devised a seemingly simple experiment to explore a puzzle that has confounded doctors since at least the 16th century: the sensation that a ghostly limb remains after the amputation of a body part.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101788221

What is a phantom limb? Why is it a problem? How did Ramachandran help to 'cure' this problem?

Over the weekend, 14 people were trapped in an elevator in the tallest building in the world. They were safely returned to solid ground within 15 minutes, according to Otis, the company that designed the lift for the new Burj Khalifa complex in Dubai. But the incident undeniably tarnished the unveiling of what had been called the most perfect elevator system in the world.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122457774

In a concrete basement at the University of Sydney, I sat in a chair waiting to have my brain altered by an electromagnetic pulse. My forehead was connected, by a series of electrodes, to a machine that looked something like an old-fashioned beauty-salon hair dryer and was sunnily described to me as a ''Danish-made transcranial magnetic stimulator.'' This was not just any old Danish-made transcranial magnetic stimulator, however; this was the Medtronic Mag Pro, and it was being operated by Allan Snyder, one of the world's most remarkable scientists of human cognition.

http://wireheading.com/brainstim/savant.html