Major memory for microblogs

Online social networking is vastly popular and permits its members to post their thoughts as microblogs, an opportunity that people exploit, on Facebook alone, over 30 million times an hour. Such trivial ephemera, one might think, should vanish quickly from memory; conversely, they may comprise the sort of information that our memories are tuned to recognize, if that which we readily generate, we also readily store. In the first two experiments, participants' memory for Facebook posts was found to be strikingly stronger than their memory for human faces or sentences from books-a magnitude comparable to the difference in memory strength between amnesics and healthy controls. The second experiment suggested that this difference is not due to Facebook posts spontaneously generating social elaboration, because memory for posts is enhanced as much by adding social elaboration as is memory for book sentences. Our final experiment, using headlines, sentences, and reader comments from articles, suggested that the remarkable memory for microblogs is also not due to their completeness or simply their topic, but may be a more general phenomenon of their being the largely spontaneous and natural emanations of the human mind.</p

The Things You Do:Internal Models of Others' Expected Behaviour Guide Action Observation

Predictions allow humans to manage uncertainties within social interactions. Here, we investigate how explicit and implicit person models-how different people behave in different situations-shape these predictions. In a novel action identification task, participants judged whether actors interacted with or withdrew from objects. In two experiments, we manipulated, unbeknownst to participants, the two actors action likelihoods across situations, such that one actor typically interacted with one object and withdrew from the other, while the other actor showed the opposite behaviour. In Experiment 2, participants additionally received explicit information about the two individuals that either matched or mismatched their actual behaviours. The data revealed direct but dissociable effects of both kinds of person information on action identification. Implicit action likelihoods affected response times, speeding up the identification of typical relative to atypical actions, irrespective of the explicit knowledge about the individual's behaviour. Explicit person knowledge, in contrast, affected error rates, causing participants to respond according to expectations instead of observed behaviour, even when they were aware that the explicit information might not be valid. Together, the data show that internal models of others' behaviour are routinely re-activated during action observation. They provide first evidence of a person-specific social anticipation system, which predicts forthcoming actions from both explicit information and an individuals' prior behaviour in a situation. These data link action observation to recent models of predictive coding in the non-social domain where similar dissociations between implicit effects on stimulus identification and explicit behavioural wagers have been reported

Using Cultural Representations in Video Games to Confront Stereotypes and Misconceptions About Brazil: \u3cem\u3eFavelas, Futebol,\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eBrasilidade\u3c/em\u3e

Despite being the fifth largest country on earth, Brazil’s representation in video games, from stories to settings to characters, has been limited. Brazilian settings in video games include the exoticized Amazon or the famous shantytowns, the favelas. Portrayals of the favelas turn them into shooting galleries, built on stereotypes of lawlessness and militarism. Brazilian video game characters are built on signifiers of Brasilidade, or “Brazilian-ness,” including the hypersexualization of women and futebol (i.e., soccer) fanatic men. Characters originating from the Amazon have been portrayed as exotic literal monsters, electric green men, and fish people. This chapter explores these stereotypes and misrepresentations, as well as recent positive developments in Brazilian video game development that confront these tropes, presenting a richer, more diverse view of Brasilidade, or what it means to be Brazilian. Recommendations for how to teach around and with these representations will be discussed as a way to challenge stereotypes and move toward more critical gaming practices that unpack the role global cultural representation in gaming plays in power and social justice in online encounters, and ultimately, with the Other