Making ordinary decisions in extraordinary times

New Ideas: Ordinary is Extraordinary

With the initial issue of this journal, a new challenge has been offered to the world of sports nutrition: initiate "team oriented" research and clinical trials in order to make dynamic progress in terms of understanding and applying nutrition principals to the field of competitive sports. It is our further challenge that these teams think "outside the box" in terms of their approach to elucida...

In defense of the "ordinary"/"extraordinary" distinction.

The Extraordinary Nature of Barney's Drumming: A Complementary Study of Ordinary Noise Making in Chimpanzees

In a previous study (Dufour et al., 2015) we reported the unusual characteristics of the drumming performance of a chimpanzee named Barney. His sound production, several sequences of repeated drumming on an up-turned plastic barrel, shared features typical for human musical drumming: it was rhythmical, decontextualized, and well controlled by the chimpanzee. This type of performance raises ques...

Developing concepts of ordinary and extraordinary communication.

We examine how understandings of ordinary and extraordinary communication develop. Three- to 10-year-old children and adults (N = 183) were given scenarios in which a protagonist wanted help from a human (their parent) or from God. Scenarios varied in whether protagonists expressed their desires aloud (by asking) or silently (by hoping), whether (for human scenarios) parents were nearby or far ...

Children's understanding of ordinary and extraordinary minds.

How and when do children develop an understanding of extraordinary mental capacities? The current study tested 56 preschoolers on false-belief and knowledge-ignorance tasks about the mental states of contrasting agents--some agents were ordinary humans, some had exceptional perceptual capacities, and others possessed extraordinary mental capacities. Results indicated that, in contrast to younge...