Infants Learn to Walk by Learning to Fall
When a baby starts to fall, our natural instincts tell us to protect them and quickly catch them. In general, parents’ instincts are to catch their children before they “fall” in many aspects in life....
View ArticleOutreach Event: Brain Booths!
Psychology in Action’s Outreach Initiative teamed up with Interaxon, an interdepartmental undergraduate neuroscience educational outreach group at UCLA, to participate in two events with the Los...
View ArticleHow to Change the World
If you enter the world of research psychology, there will come a time when you’re talking about your studies at a party and you suddenly realize that no one cares. If you’re lucky, this will happen...
View ArticleGraduate Program Interviews: Cognitive Psychology
So you applied to PhD programs in Psychology in the fall, with some kind of interest or focus in cognitive psychology – memory, attention, perception, thinking, learning, cognitive neuroscience,...
View ArticleThere is a green% chance you will read this post.
Recently The Onion posted this tongue-in-cheek article regarding synesthesia. For those of you who may not know, synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which people experience cross-sensory...
View ArticleWhat is color (in vision)?
Roses are red, Violets are blue, And you probably think That the sky is blue too. Color, however, exists only in the mind: Color is our experience that maps onto the physical luminance properties of...
View ArticleMemory in the Mountains: How Cognitive Psychology Can Improve Rock Climbing
“You can never climb the same mountain twice, not even in memory. Memory rebuilds the mountain, changes the weather, retells the jokes, remakes all the moves.” – Lito Tejada-Flores, Extreme Skiier,...
View ArticleHow to Take Good Notes: Go Low-Tech
More and more students are opting to take notes on laptops to save trees and – they assume – take better notes. But is this assumption correct? According to the findings UCLA’s Dr. Danny Oppenheimer...
View ArticleSignal Detection: Decision Making in Uncertainty
We all experience uncertainty: How did I do on that test? What do they think of me? Where did I leave my keys? Is my phone ringing? In these and other uncertain situations, we have to take the evidence...
View ArticleHighlights of “Building Minds”
For those who missed “Building Minds: Microchips & Molecules”, here is a taste of the action. For all who packed the CNSI auditorium in May for our annual interdisciplinary symposium, here is a...
View ArticleLet’s fight (the bad guys): Do superheroes teach kids good or evil?
Everyone loves a good superhero story. Superheroes have been a fixture in American pop culture for decades, but in the past 10-15 years we’ve witnessed a resurgence of superhero mania. Between movies,...
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