Updates from Derren Brown and the Enigma Crew

“Psychological research has shown various ways “false memories” are created, such as through the power of suggestion or through vivid imagination. Now scientists studying imagination have found that people who watched a video of someone else doing a simple action often didn’t remember and thought they had done it themselves when asked about it two weeks later. “This is a completely new type of false memory,” says Gerald Echterhoff, a psychology professor at the University of Muenster in Germany and co-author of the paper published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science. “This is a false memory from just observing someone,” he says.

Psychologist Daniel Schacter of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., who has edited a book on false memories, says he hasn’t read the new paper, but it “sounds like an extension of earlier work that has shown imagining you’d done something can result in false memories.” “I think it’s partly new and partly related to earlier work,” Schacter says. “You saw something on TV that you think actually happened. It’s another kind of example of what people have talked about as a source memory failure.”

Echterhoff says, on average, participants reported false memories of doing an action they really didn’t do almost a quarter of the time. In this study, as well as in several follow-up experiments, the majority of participants misremembered, thinking they had done something they had merely observed. Since the first research on 170 participants, findings have been replicated with almost 500 participants, he says.”

Read more at USAToday (Thanks Christopher C)

“Scientists have identified a gene that causes short-sightedness, a discovery which paves the way for treatment to prevent one of the world’s most common eye disorders. So could this mean the end of spectacles? A pair of glasses used to come with its own brand of humiliation in the classroom. “Four-eyes”, “Specky-git” and “Goggles” were some of the names that rang out in the playground and scarred many a childhood. Short-sightedness, or myopia, which makes distant objects appear blurred, often begins in childhood, and it appears to be growing in the UK – now affecting about one in three British adults. But a scientific breakthrough announced this week could start to reduce that number within a decade.

Scientists based in London have identified a gene that causes myopia and are confident that drugs could be developed to halt the distorted growth of the eye that brings about the condition. In about 10 years, shortsightedness could be cured through eye drops, says Dr Chris Hammond, who led the research at King’s College London. “We’ve known for many years that the most important risk factor to short-sightedness as you get older is family history,” he says. “If one parent is shortsighted then you have a significantly increased risk of being shortsighted, and if you have two shortsighted parents, then you have an even greater risk. But until now, we hadn’t identified any genes responsible for that susceptibility.”

In a 12-year study which looked at 4,000 twins, the researchers at KCL’s Department of Twin Research identified the RASGRF1 gene as one which had variations shared by people with myopia.”

Read more at BBC News (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)

Adults and children really don’t see eye-to-eye, according to a new study.

“The research reveals that kids under the age of 12 perceive visual information differently than adults do. While adults process different visual cues into one unified chunk of information, kids separate visual information. The childhood method of processing may allow kids to fine-tune their visual systems as they grow, the study authors say.

Researchers have long known that youngsters don’t fully integrate sensory information until after about age 8. Before then, information received by touch, sight and hearing isn’t as closely linked as the same information would be in the adult brain. But the use of even one organ can provide multiple types of information. In the case of vision, people perceive depth based on several cues, including binocular disparity (small differences between the images produced by each eye) and texture (nearby things are more detailed).

To find out how this information is integrated, scientists at University College London and Birkbeck, University of London asked children and adults to wear 3-D glasses and compare images of two slanted surfaces to judge which was the “flattest.” Images presented the participants with texture and binocular information either separately or at once. While adults were more accurate in their responses when they got both pieces of visual information together, kids weren’t, at least not kids under 12. Beyond age 12, children combined both types of information to improve their accuracy. The findings imply that adults combine different kinds of visual information into a single unified estimate, while children do not.”

Read more at Live Science (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)