Knowledge that Transforms

Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students' capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers' tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.

An important yet untested assumption within personality psychology is that more important person characteristics are more densely reflected in language. We investigated how ratings of importance and other term properties are associated with one another and with a term's frequency of use. Research participants were asked to provide terms that described individuals they knew, which resulted in a set of 624 adjectives. These terms were independently rated for importance, social desirability, observability, stateness versus traitness, level of abstraction, and base rate. Terms rated as describing more important person characteristics were in fact used more often by the participants in the sample and in a large corpus of online communications (close to 500 million words). More frequently used terms and more positive terms were also rated as being more abstract, more traitlike, and more widely applicable (i.e., having a greater base rate). We discuss the implications of these findings with regard to person perception in general.

In the research reported here, we examined whether individual differences in authoritarianism have expressions in early childhood. We expected that young children would be more responsive to cues of deviance and status to the extent that their parents endorsed authoritarian values. Using a sample of 43 preschoolers and their parents, we found support for both expectations. Children of parents high in authoritarianism trusted adults who adhered to convention (vs. adults who did not) more than did children of parents low in authoritarianism. Furthermore, compared with children of parents low in authoritarianism, children of parents high in authoritarianism gave greater weight to a status-based "adult = reliable" heuristic in trusting an ambiguously conventional adult. Findings were consistent using two different measures of parents' authoritarian values. These findings demonstrate that children's trust-related behaviors vary reliably with their parents' orientations toward authority and convention, and suggest that individual differences in authoritarianism express themselves well before early adulthood.

In the research reported here, we investigated the debiasing effect of mindfulness meditation on the sunk-cost bias. We conducted four studies (one correlational and three experimental); the results suggest that increased mindfulness reduces the tendency to allow unrecoverable prior costs to influence current decisions. Study 1 served as an initial correlational demonstration of the positive relationship between trait mindfulness and resistance to the sunk-cost bias. Studies 2a and 2b were laboratory experiments examining the effect of a mindfulness-meditation induction on increased resistance to the sunk-cost bias. In Study 3, we examined the mediating mechanisms of temporal focus and negative affect, and we found that the sunk-cost bias was attenuated by drawing one's temporal focus away from the future and past and by reducing state negative affect, both of which were accomplished through mindfulness meditation.

A recent genome-wide-association study of educational attainment identified three single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) whose associations, despite their small effect sizes (each R (2) ≈ 0.02%), reached genome-wide significance (p < 5 × 10(-8)) in a large discovery sample and were replicated in an independent sample (p < .05). The study also reported associations between educational attainment and indices of SNPs called "polygenic scores." In three studies, we evaluated the robustness of these findings. Study 1 showed that the associations with all three SNPs were replicated in another large (N = 34,428) independent sample. We also found that the scores remained predictive (R (2) ≈ 2%) in regressions with stringent controls for stratification (Study 2) and in new within-family analyses (Study 3). Our results show that large and therefore well-powered genome-wide-association studies can identify replicable genetic associations with behavioral traits. The small effect sizes of individual SNPs are likely to be a major contributing factor explaining the striking contrast between our results and the disappointing replication record of most candidate-gene studies.

Negative age stereotypes that older individuals assimilate from their culture predict detrimental outcomes, including worse physical function. We examined, for the first time, whether positive age stereotypes, presented subliminally across multiple sessions in the community, would lead to improved outcomes. Each of 100 older individuals (age=61-99 years, M=81) was randomly assigned to an implicit-positive-age-stereotype-intervention group, an explicit-positive-age-stereotype-intervention group, a combined implicit- and explicit-positive-age-stereotype-intervention group, or a control group. Interventions occurred at four 1-week intervals. The implicit intervention strengthened positive age stereotypes, which strengthened positive self-perceptions of aging, which, in turn, improved physical function. The improvement in these outcomes continued for 3 weeks after the last intervention session. Further, negative age stereotypes and negative self-perceptions of aging were weakened. For all outcomes, the implicit intervention's impact was greater than the explicit intervention's impact. The physical-function effect of the implicit intervention surpassed a previous study's 6-month-exercise-intervention's effect with participants of similar ages. The current study's findings demonstrate the potential of directing implicit processes toward physical-function enhancement over time.

Little is known about infants' abilities to perceive and categorize their own speech sounds or vocalizations produced by other infants. In the present study, prebabbling infants were habituated to /i/ ("ee") or /a/ ("ah") vowels synthesized to simulate men, women, and children, and then were presented with new instances of the habituation vowel and a contrasting vowel on different trials, with all vowels simulating infant talkers. Infants showed greater recovery of interest to the contrasting vowel than to the habituation vowel, which demonstrates recognition of the habituation-vowel category when it was produced by an infant. A second experiment showed that encoding the vowel category and detecting the novel vowel required additional processing when infant vowels were included in the habituation set. Despite these added cognitive demands, infants demonstrated the ability to track vowel categories in a multitalker array that included infant talkers. These findings raise the possibility that young infants can categorize their own vocalizations, which has important implications for early vocal learning.

Human adults attribute character traits to faces readily and with high consensus. In two experiments investigating the development of face-to-trait inference, adults and children ages 3 through 10 attributed trustworthiness, dominance, and competence to pairs of faces. In Experiment 1, the attributions of 3- to 4-year-olds converged with those of adults, and 5- to 6-year-olds' attributions were at adult levels of consistency. Children ages 3 and above consistently attributed the basic mean/nice evaluation not only to faces varying in trustworthiness (Experiment 1) but also to faces varying in dominance and competence (Experiment 2). This research suggests that the predisposition to judge others using scant facial information appears in adultlike forms early in childhood and does not require prolonged social experience.

Research on episodic memory has established that spontaneous eye movements occur to spaces associated with retrieved information even if those spaces are blank at the time of retrieval. Although it has been claimed that such looks to "nothing" can function as facilitatory retrieval cues, there is currently no conclusive evidence for such an effect. In the present study, we addressed this fundamental issue using four direct eye manipulations in the retrieval phase of an episodic memory task: (a) free viewing on a blank screen, (b) maintaining central fixation, (c) looking inside a square congruent with the location of the to-be-recalled objects, and (d) looking inside a square incongruent with the location of the to-be-recalled objects. Our results provide novel evidence of an active and facilitatory role of gaze position during memory retrieval and demonstrate that memory for the spatial relationship between objects is more readily affected than memory for intrinsic object features.

Signals of threat--such as fearful faces--are processed with priority and have privileged access to awareness. This fear advantage is commonly believed to engage a specialized subcortical pathway to the amygdala that bypasses visual cortex and processes predominantly low-spatial-frequency information but is largely insensitive to high spatial frequencies. We tested visual detection of low- and high-pass-filtered fearful and neutral faces under continuous flash suppression and sandwich masking, and we found consistently that the fear advantage was specific to high spatial frequencies. This demonstrates that rapid fear detection relies not on low- but on high-spatial-frequency information--indicative of an involvement of cortical visual areas. These findings challenge the traditional notion that a subcortical pathway to the amygdala is essential for the initial processing of fear signals and support the emerging view that the cerebral cortex is crucial for the processing of ecologically relevant signals.