A 1945 magazine feature set off the Skinner baby-box myth
B. F. Skinner built a heated crib for his daughter Deborah. A 1945 magazine feature and a confusion with the Skinner box turned it into a false legend.
tag archive
#psychology.
Every story tagged #psychology.
Learning London's streets grows a cabbie's hippocampus
Trainee London cabbies who pass The Knowledge grow a larger posterior hippocampus. Those who fail do not, a UCL study of 79 trainees found.
The brain that changes itself, and what keeps it steady
Neuroplasticity, once dismissed, is now core brain science. Neuron timing strengthens or weakens links, and with too much change no memory would form.
A rubber hand can start to feel like your own
Seeing a fake hand stroked in time with your hidden real one makes the brain claim it. It works only if the fake hand sits where a real arm could.
Teachers' forecasts track exam results, and can also move them
A UK study found teacher forecasts match exam results closely, but the misses follow pupils' backgrounds. Another linked teacher training to higher scores.
Harry Harlow's monkeys preferred a cloth mother to a wire one
Harry Harlow's infant rhesus monkeys fed from a wire mother, then went straight back to cling to a cloth one. Comfort, not milk, drew them.
Why Jung broke with Freud, and the school he built after
Carl Jung rejected Freud's view that all motivation is sexual and the unconscious purely personal. After the split he founded analytical psychology.