EUREKA!

EUREKA!

CAMPUS

NEW FINDINGS AND RESEARCH

Same Wavelength

Friends think alike.

The roots of friendship run deeper than researchers had suspected, reports professor of psychological and brain sciences Thalia Wheatley in Nature Communications. Wheatley, along with coauthors Carolyn Parkinson, Adv’16, and Tuck professor Adam Kleinbaum, surveyed 279 first-year M.B.A. students to map their social networks and determine degrees of connectivity between friends. The researchers then used fMRI scanning to measure the neural responses of 42 participants as they watched videos. Those who were close friends demonstrated the greatest similarities in brain activity. “We can see that neural responses are more similar among friends,” says Wheatley. “Now we get to ask: Why is that so?” The researchers plan a follow-up study to test whether they can predict which first-year students will become friends.

Heads Up, Phones Down

Smartphones impair memory.

»> Shooting and sharing smartphone photos reduces our ability to recall the moments we’ve photographed, according to a new study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Lead researcher Emma Templeton, a graduate student in the psychological and brain sciences department, asked a few hundred participants to tour a church and take notes on what they saw. Part of the group was told to shoot photos on smart devices. Others had no gadgets. When Templeton gave the group a surprise quiz a week later, she found that the photo takers weren’t able to recall details as well as those who relied solely on their memories. “Ironically, our results suggest that using media to preserve these moments may prevent people from fully experiencing them in the first place,” writes Templeton.