Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ahead of Print.
Psychology has made great strides in how researchers collect, analyze, and report data, but there has been less attention to improving hypothesis generation. Some researchers still rely on intuition, serendipitous observations, or a limited reading of the ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ahead of Print.
Many scientists continue to conceive of object detection as occurring in stages that map onto levels in the visual hierarchy. This article reviews experiments suggesting that multiple interpretations and their semantics are activated at high levels before ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 51-56, February 2025.
The prevention of depressive disorders may be an important way to reduce the disease burden. All three types of prevention (universal, selective, and indicated) have potential but also have important limitations. Increasing evidence suggests that ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 57-63, February 2025.
There is a pressing need for feasible, scalable interventions that address children’s and adults’ math anxiety and result in enhanced math learning. In this article, we suggest a pathway toward intervention development. First, we consider what is known ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 64-70, February 2025.
During the past 20 years a number of articles have appeared within a field that has become known as the “science of magic.” This subdiscipline of psychology posits that the ancient art of conjuring can be used to develop psychological theories and ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 21-28, February 2025.
An emerging literature on “the psychology of poverty” suggests that the experience of poverty itself has psychological consequences, some of which may make escaping poverty more difficult. We synthesize the evidence base from both psychology and economics ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 36-42, February 2025.
Recent years have seen a surge in research on why people fall for misinformation and what can be done about it. Drawing on a framework that conceptualizes truth judgments of true and false information as a signal-detection problem, the current article ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 29-35, February 2025.
People with schizophrenia suffer from hallucinations and delusions as well as from significant cognitive impairments. Working memory is a critical resource for many complex cognitive operations and is a critical area of impairment in schizophrenia. Here ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 43-50, February 2025.
A growing body of research documents the positive impact that action video game play has on a range of cognitive skills. Such a result, in which training on one task promotes a broad variety of benefits, is a rarity in the cognitive training domain. ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 12-20, February 2025.
Anti-blackness remains endemic to the U.S. social order. As such, scholars have used theories of anti-blackness to contextualize the harm and violence that many Black youth experience in school settings. In the current article, we discuss the ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 34, Issue 1, Page 3-11, February 2025.
Transformer models of language represent a step change in our ability to account for cognitive phenomena. Although the specific architecture that has garnered recent interest is quite young, many of its components have antecedents in the cognitive science ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ahead of Print.
A rich storehouse of semantic or world knowledge is a critical developmental and educational achievement. This article summarizes a research program that elucidates a productive or self-generative means of building this knowledge base, namely, self-...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ahead of Print.
Establishing a causal relationship requires not only the presence of a factor of interest but also the demonstration that the relationship is absent when the factor is absent. Such ideal conditions are rare, especially in observational studies in which ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ahead of Print.
Beliefs about the changeable or stable nature of human attributes, that is, growth or fixed mindsets, act as fundamental frameworks guiding social perception. These mindsets are closely allied with other important beliefs that can be used to sustain and ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ahead of Print.
Advances in computer technology have produced a flood of new data sets for understanding human language. However, nearly all of these new data sets are based on written, rather than spoken, language. This means that, despite their importance, open-access ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ahead of Print.
It is often said that much of consumption is “social” in nature, but what does this mean? This article proposes the social congruency framework for differentiating between different types of social consumption experiences—characterizing a consumption ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ahead of Print.
Humans are highly efficient in finding objects in their structured, daily-life environments. Behavioral studies have demonstrated that this efficiency is supported by expectations derived from scene context. Here, I review neuroimaging studies that have ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ahead of Print.
Research on children’s responses to preventive health behaviors during COVID-19 provides insights of both practical and theoretical importance: Understanding how children reason about preventive behaviors is crucial for developing effective public-health ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ahead of Print.
Basic spatial terms such as the English prepositions “in,” “on,” “above,” “below,” “left,” and “right” represent spatial relationships that are encoded in languages of the world and are readily learned by young children. How do children learn these terms, ...

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ahead of Print.
Early caregiving experiences have strong, persistent links to emotion regulation. In this article we offer a view that the content represented in emotion-regulation neurobiology in part reflects consolidated interpersonal-affective memories abstracted ...