Pay attention and you might miss it: Greater learning during attentional lapses.

Attentional lapses have been found to impair everything from basic perception to learning and memory. Yet, despite the well-documented costs of lapses on cognition, recent work suggests that lapses might unexpectedly confer some benefits. One potential benefit is that lapses broaden our learning to integrate seemingly irrelevant content that could later prove useful-a benefit that prior research focusing only on goal-relevant memory would miss. Here, we measure how fluctuations in sustained attention influence the learning of seemingly goal-irrelevant content that competes for attention with target content. Participants completed a correlated flanker task in which they categorized central targets (letters or numbers) while ignoring peripheral flanking symbols that shared hidden probabilistic relationships with the targets. We found that across participants, higher rates of attentional lapses correlated with greater learning of the target-flanker relationships. Moreover, within participants, learning was more evident during attentional lapses. These findings address long-standing theoretical debates and reveal a benefit of attentional lapses: they expand the scope of learning and decisions beyond the strictly relevant.

Facial attractiveness, applicants' qualifications, and judges' expertise about decisions in preselective recruitment.

The aim of this study was to assess how facial attractiveness, applicants' qualifications, and the expertise of judges influence preselective recruitment in a relational occupation, hotel management. Participants (96 hotel managers and 96 students) were asked to judge a fictitious applicant based on a resume and a photograph. Overall, analysis showed that the classic effect of attractiveness on the judgments of evaluators was modulated by the applicants' qualifications.

Teaching social responsibility: the Manhattan project. Commentary on "The Six Domains of Research".

This paper discusses the critical necessity of teaching students about the social and ethical responsibilities of scientists. Both a university scientist and a middle school science teacher reflect on the value of teaching the ethical issues that confront scientists. In the development of the atomic bomb in the US-led Manhattan Project, scientists faced the growing threat of atomic bombs by the Germans and Japanese and the ethical issues involved in successfully completing such a destructive weapon. The Manhattan Project is a prime example of the types of ethical dilemmas and social responsibilities that scientists may confront.