Fwd: This Week in Psychological Science (TWiPS) - May 8, 2012

TWiPS is an exclusive benefit   for APS Members.     Psychological Science   in the News The Future of Focus Groups: My Brain Knows What You Like Forbes    Read the Story To Avoid Stupid Mistakes, Think in French Bloomberg BusinessWeek   Read the Story          Why Clingy People Feel Colder TIME   Read the Story             Can You Think Your Way To That Hole-in-One? National Public Radio Read the Story         Essere materialisti rende depressi La Stampa   Read the Story             Older and Wiser? The Economist Read the Story             It's Not a Tumor! The Psychology Behind Cyberchondria Newsweek Read the Story    May 8, 2012 This Week in Psychological Science (TWiPS)  The links below take you to the journal via the APS website. If not already logged in, you will be redirected to log-in using your last name (Machizawa) and Member ID (90728). Human Visual Short-Term Memory Precision Can Be Varied at Will When the Number of Retained Items Is Low Maro G. Machizawa, Crystal C. W. Goh, and Jon Driver Can the precision with which items are retained in visual working memory (VWM) be altered? Participants were shown displays containing 4 or 8 bars. The bars were colored red or green to indicate whether fine or coarse memory precision would be needed to perform the task. One of the bars was then rotated 15 (fine) or 45 (coarse) degrees, and participants had to indicate if the bar had been rotated clockwise or counterclockwise. Contralateral delay activity -- a neural marker of VWM -- was greater on trials with 4 bars than on trials with 8 bars only when participants anticipated having to use fine precision. These findings indicate that people can enhance the precision of items in their VWM when there are a small number of items. Chaotic Homes and Children's Disruptive Behavior: A Longitudinal Cross-Lagged Twin Study    Sara R. Jaffee, Ken B. Hanscombe, Claire M. A. Haworth, Oliver S. P. Davis, and Robert Plomin The authors of this study were interested in understanding the genetic and environmental influences on the relationship between chaotic households and disruptive behavior in children. Twins reported their perceived level of household chaos, and parents reported their children's level of disruptive behavior at ages 9 and 12. Researchers found a cross-lagged relationship indicating that environmental influences on children's perceptions of household chaos at age 9 explained some of the environmental variation in children's disruptive behaviors at age 12. This suggests that the effect of household chaos at age 9 on disruptive behaviors at age 12 was environmentally mediated. A Short-Term Testing Effect in Cross-Language Recognition    Peter P. J. L. Verkoeijen, Samantha Bouwmeester, and Gino Camp Researchers know that repeated testing leads to better long-term memory for information than does repeated study; however, they are still unsure of why this occurs. Researchers had Dutch-English bilingual participants learn several lists of words in Dutch. In some instances they were tested after an initial study period (test condition), and in others they were told to study the list again (restudy condition). Participants' memory for the words was then tested in Dutch or English. Words in the restudy condition were remembered more poorly when participants were tested in English than when they were tested in Dutch; whereas words in the test condition were remembered similarly regardless of the language used. This indicates there are differences in the way restudying and testing strengthen memory. A Power-Law Model of Psychological Memory Strength in Short- and Long-Term Recognition    Chris Donkin and Robert M. Nosofsky The rate at which we forget information can be mathematically described by power functions. Traditionally the form of the functional relationship depends on the scale used by for the variable of interest. In this experiment, participants studied a list of 12 items and were tested on their memory for the items. The authors discovered that a version of the exemplar recognition model that assumes a lag-based power law was a better fit for both the participant's responses and their response times than a variety of other models. The fact that the model was a good fit for both variables even though they were measured on different scales indicates that the model was independent of the variable scale used, suggesting a possible power law of memory strength.   TWiPS is an exclusive benefit for APS Members.   Please contact APS at aps@psychologicalscience.org or by  telephone at +1 202.293.9300 with questions or comments.   Visit APS on the Web at www.psychologicalscience.org

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Formal obituary for Jon Driver, published in The Times

written by Prof Geraint Rees and Prof Ray Dolan, current directors at UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, in which Jon has been affiliated to.

The copyright belongs to The Times, however, if allowed, I would like to share with the world.

Here is the link to his departmental website:
http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/Staff-Lists/MemberDetails.php?Title=Prof&FirstName=Jon&LastName=Driver

1/3/12 Professor Jon Driver | The Times

Professor Jon Driver

Leading cognitive neuroscientist who carried out pioneering studies into how humans focus attention and integrate sensory information

Professor Jon Driver was one of the world’s leading cognitive neuroscientists who at

University College London pursued pioneering studies on human attention, of how

humans perceive the world and how we integrate different types of sensory

information.

Jonathon Stevens Driver was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire in 1962. The family

moved to Cottingham, near Hull, and then lived on Hull University’s residential

campus, where his father taught mathematics. He attended Hymers College in Hull

where he played cello in the school orchestra but he preferred to invest his energy in

playing the bass guitar.

These early years furnished few clues about a future career in science. As a teenager he

played in a local band, the London Boys, covering Stax and Motown classics. A local

doctor took him under his wing and taught him how to fish the surrounding quarry

lakes. A turning point in his life came when his mother, a school librarian, sought to

divert him from these teenage pursuits. She brought home two classic textbooks by the

renowned psychologists Richard Gregory and Alexander Luria. Reading these also

coincided with personal encounters with neurological patients, as a volunteer at a local

hospital, and with his grandmother who suffered from Parkinson’s disease. His

imagination was captured and these formative experiences set him on his career path.

He read Experimental Psychology at Queen’s College, Oxford. Graduating with a firstclass

degree in 1984 he progressed to a DPhil, awarded in 1988. Driver thrived in the

intellectual energy of Oxford. His PhD supervisors, Alan Allport and Peter McLeod,

gave him contrasting examples of scholarship and realism, but also left him to pursue

his own interests. This freedom led him to finesse his incomparable skills in designing

and conducting ingenious experiments that addressed fundamental issues of how the

brain works. His chosen topic was attention, though he would wistfully say he had no

clue what attention was. He acknowledged that nobody had bettered William James,

the American psychologist, who remarked a century earlier that attention “implies

withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition

which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state.”

During his time in Oxford he honed his skills in fly-fishing. Oxford afforded a perfect

base for excursions into the chalk streams of southern England. Here his boyhood love

of landscape and water coalesced with his academic interest in attention. His

excellence as a fly-fisher exploited the first principle of the art: cast without engaging

the fishes’ attention. His reputation as a rising academic star was already apparent by

the time he completed his graduate studies. During a period as a visiting assistant

professor in Oregon in the early nineties he experienced first-hand the dynamism and

more informal style of US science, something he incorporated into his future modus

operandi. Here he met his future wife, Nilli Lavie, also a psychologist.

Returning to Cambridge as a lecturer, his academic trajectory was firmly established.

In the late 1990s he moved to Birkbeck College and then to University College London.

Driver was by this time acutely aware that experimental psychology was a discipline

going through a crisis brought on by the rising dominance of new brain imaging

technologies and the emergence of the new discipline of cognitive neuroscience. He

embraced the possibilities afforded by these developments, realising that neuroscience

afforded a powerful means of arbitrating between different psychological hypotheses.

He was appointed a Professor in Psychology in 1996 and became Director of the UCL

Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in 2004. In 2009 he stepped down from this

position following an award of a Royal Society Anniversary Research Professorship and

joined the faculty of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL.

Over the course of his career he pursued pioneering studies of how humans perceive the

world, how we integrate different types of sensory information and how we use

attention to focus on particular things. A characteristic feature of his work was the

innovative combination of new methods for studying the mind and brain in an

integrative manner. His contribution was acknowledged by election as Fellow of both

the British Academy and the Academy of Medical Sciences.

But it was not for his scientific discoveries alone that he will be remembered. His

incisive intellect, critical questioning and occasionally mumbling style of delivery

would often intimidate new students, though they rapidly realised he cared deeply

about their careers. He gave freely of his time not only to his immediate group but to

the wider neuroscience community. The combination of humility and intellect left a

powerful impression on all those who met him, as did his engaging smile and his

twinkling eyes. In a recent interview he said of his field that “the best research in

psychology is still to come”; few would doubt that was also true of his own work.

He is survived by his wife and two sons.

Professor Jon Driver, neuroscientist, was born on July 4, 1962. He

committed suicide on November 28, 2011, aged 49

© Times Newspapers Limited 2011 | Version 1.27.0.11 (34012)