Why toddlers don't do what they're told

New cognitive research shows that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present, but instead call up the past as they need it. ‘There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they’re just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different,’ says professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Munakata’s team used a computer game and a setup that measures the diameter of the pupil of the eye to determine mental effort to study the cognitive abilities of 3-and-a-half-year-olds and 8-year-olds. The research concluded that while everything you tell toddlers seems to go in one ear and out the other, the study found that toddlers listen, but then store the information for later use. ‘For example, let’s say it’s cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside,’ says doctoral student Christopher Chatham. ‘You might expect the child to plan for the future, think "OK it’s cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm." But what we suggest is that this isn’t what goes on in a 3-year-old’s brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.

Source: Slashdot.

Study Finds Guys Aren’t That Into Girls Who Drink

Image by Ingorrr via Flickr

Sometimes when on a date with someone new, you may drink to relax a little. However, one drink may turn into five or even more than that. While drinking may loosen you up a little to have fun, a new study says that guys would rather a girl not drink when out with them.

A survey of 3,616 college students – 62 percent were women – found that women greatly overestimated the amount of alcohol a guy wanted them to drink. The women answered questions about their drinking behavior and also their thoughts on what they thought a college man would want them to drink. The men were asked about their preferences of drinking when being with a friend, date or girlfriend.

“Although traditionally, men drink more than women, research has shown that women have steadily been drinking more and more over the last several decades,” said the study’s lead author, Joseph LaBrie, associate professor of psychology at LMU. “Our research suggests women believe men find excessive drinking sexually attractive and appealing, but it appears this is a giant misperception.”

The research actually showed that 71 percent of the women thought that men wanted them to drink excessively.

As for the rest of the results, 26 percent of the women thought men wanted to be friends with a woman that drinks five or more drinks, while 17 percent of the women would be the most sexually attracted to a woman that drank five or more drinks.

[ed]Actually I think this article might be wrong – most guys can’t remember girls who drink because they’ve been drinking so much themselves…[/ed]

See the full article at InventorSpot.

Is Twitter making you feel less lonely?

You sleep with your boss’ lover. You steal a stranger’s dog. Or you win the lottery. Who is the first person you tell? And who is the second?

I ask only because I came across this utterly depressing conclusion about humanity from John Cacioppo, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago: Americans have fewer people to confide in now than they did 20 years previously.

Apparently, it’s down to two from three.

In 2004, 25 percent of people claimed that they had not been able to confide in anyone for six months. Twenty years previously, that figure had only been 7 percent.

For some people, this might explain at least one of the attractions of Twitter–or any other social-networking contraption. You feel you have to tell someone. So you tell, well, everyone. Or at least everyone that you can friend, name, follow, stalk, or badger into accepting your offer of association.

Read the full article at CNET News.