Does reductive information increase satisfaction with scientific explanations? Three preregistered tests of the reductive allure effect.

Understanding information processing biases is critical for improving scientific literacy. Research suggests that people rate scientific explanations with reductive jargon (e.g.

Addressing the known unknowns in student leader development.

This article highlights the current state of "what we know we do not know" about student leadership development and suggests specific research agendas and program assessment methods. This article includes the practical description of how rigorous methods could be used to address these issues using examples for both researchers and program assessment staff and the description of a conceptual model that could be employed to organize how leadership program outcomes are evaluated.

Reading the Brain: An Interdisciplinary First-Year Seminar on the Intersection of Neuroscience, Literature, and Popular Culture.

Topics related to the brain are becoming increasingly common in cultural products such as literature and film. Media representations of the brain and mind therefore provide an interesting method for introducing first-year college students to the field of neuroscience. In this article, we describe an interdisciplinary first-year seminar that we implemented at Gettysburg College, co-taught by a cognitive neuroscientist (KDW) and a literary scholar (TFB).

Letters, not words, are processed holistically.

Observers cannot accurately discriminate the top halves of two sequentially presented three-letter words. One interpretation of this effect is that words, like faces, are processed holistically. Here we show, in three simple experiments, that this phenomenon is more consistent with the hypothesis that letters, not words, are processed holistically.

Distinct patterns of viewpoint-dependent BOLD activity during common-object recognition and mental rotation.

A fundamental but unanswered question about the human visual system concerns the way in which misoriented objects are recognized. One hypothesis maintains that representations of incoming stimuli are transformed via parietally based spatial normalization mechanisms (eg mental rotation) to match view-specific representations in long-term memory. Using fMRI, we tested this hypothesis by directly comparing patterns of brain activity evoked during classic mental rotation and misoriented object recognition involving everyday objects.

Control networks and hemispheric asymmetries in parietal cortex during attentional orienting in different spatial reference frames.

Neuropsychological research has consistently demonstrated that spatial attention can be anchored in one of several coordinate systems, including those defined with respect to an observer (viewer-centered), to the gravitational vector (environment-centered), or to individual objects (object-centered). In the present study, we used hemodynamic correlates of brain function to investigate the neural systems that mediate attentional control in two competing reference frames. Healthy volunteers were cued to locations defined in either viewer-centered or object-centered space to discriminate the shape of visual targets subsequently presented at the cued locations.

When does the visual system use viewpoint-invariant representations during recognition?

One popular model of object recognition claims that the visual system typically describes objects using view-specific representations, but that viewpoint-invariant representations are used when objects can be specified uniquely by the arrangement of parts along a single dimension. In a series of three naming experiments using novel, two-dimensional line drawings, we test this hypothesis against alternative accounts of when viewpoint-invariant representations are used during the recognition of upright and viewplane-rotated objects. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that the number of dimensions along which featural information must be represented is the only stimulus feature that influences the type of representation used, consistent with the Tarr and Pinker model.