Sunday, March 11, 2018

How you behave in school predicts life success above and beyond family background, broad traits, and cognitive ability

How you behave in school predicts life success above and beyond family background, broad traits, and cognitive ability. Spengler, Marion,Damian, Rodica Ioana,Roberts, Brent W. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Mar 05 , 2018, http://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspp0000185

In this study, we investigated the role of student characteristics and behaviors in a longitudinal study over a 50-year timespan (using a large U.S. representative sample of high school students). We addressed the question of whether behaviors in school have any long-lasting effects for one‘s later life. Specifically, we investigated the role of being a responsible student, interest in school, writing skills, and reading skills in predicting educational attainment, occupational prestige, and income 11 years (N = 81,912) and 50 years (N = 1,952) after high school. We controlled for parental socioeconomic status, IQ, and broad personality traits in all analyses. We found that student characteristics and behaviors in adolescence predicted later educational and occupational success above and beyond parental socioeconomic status, IQ, and broad personality traits. Having higher interest in school was related to higher educational attainment at years 11 and 50, higher occupational prestige at year 11, and higher income at year 50. Higher levels of being a responsible student were related to higher educational attainment and higher occupational prestige at years 11 and 50. This was the first longitudinal study to test the role of student characteristics and behaviors over and above broad personality traits. It highlights the potential importance of what students do in school and how they react to their experiences during that time. It also highlights the possibility that things that happen in specific periods of one’s life may play out in ways far more significant than we expect.


Some people hear what they see: car indicator lights, flashing neon shop signs, and people’s movements as they walk may all trigger an auditory sensation; it is more frequent than previously thought

Sounds from seeing silent motion: Who hears them, and what looks loudest? Christopher J. Fassnidge, Elliot D. Freeman. Cortex, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.02.019

Abstract

Some people hear what they see: car indicator lights, flashing neon shop signs, and people’s movements as they walk may all trigger an auditory sensation, which we call the visual-evoked auditory response (vEAR or ‘visual ear’). We have conducted the first large-scale online survey (N>4000) of this little-known phenomenon. We analysed the prevalence of vEAR, what induces it, and what other traits are associated with it.

We asked respondents if they had previously experienced vEAR. Participants then rated silent videos for vividness of evoked auditory sensations, and answered additional questions.

Prevalence appeared higher relative to other typical synaesthesias. Prior awareness and video ratings were associated with greater frequency of other synaesthesias, including flashes evoked by sounds, and musical imagery. Higher-rated videos often depicted meaningful events that predicted sounds (e.g. collisions). However, ratings were also driven by the low-level ‘motion energy’ of non-predictive flashing or moving patterns, specifically in respondents who had previous awareness of vEAR.

Our motion energy analysis suggests that signals from visual motion processing may affect audition relatively directly, without requiring higher-level interpretative processes. While some popular explanations of synaesthesia assume rare and specific patterns of brain hyper-connectivity, the apparently high prevalence of vEAR, and its broad association with other synaesthesias and traits, are consistent with a common dependence on normal variations in physiological mechanisms of disinhibition or excitability of sensory brain areas and their functional connectivity, rather than just on specific patterns of hyper-connectivity. The prevalence of vEAR makes it easier to test such hypotheses further, and makes the results more relevant to understanding not only synaesthetic anomalies but also normal perception.

Keywords: Synaesthesia; individual differences; Audiovisual perception; Synaesthesia

---
Example: https://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/15-noisygifs.gif