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Can the representation of event sequence influence how jurorsremember and reason in a legal case? We addressed this ques-tion by examining the interaction between an individual’s pre-ferred spatial construal of time (SCT) for an external (visual-spatial) representation and the SCT of a courtroom graphic.One hundred fifty three undergraduates played the role of ju-rors in a fictitious civil trial. The details of a case were re-counted in a multimedia presentation featuring timelines an-imated in one of four orientations: left-right, right-left, top-bottom, and bottom-top. Participants were assessed on mea-sures of comprehension and causal reasoning. Results indi-cated effects of timeline orientation and SCT choice behav-ior on comprehension and reasoning. We discuss these resultsin terms of the role of attention in temporal-causal reasoning,and implications for the design of multimedia materials for thecourtroom.

There are many benefits to having a highly accurate representation of the environment. Why, then, has evolutionequipped us with a visual working memory (VWM) system that can represent only a handful of items with high accuracy?Here, we offer a normative explanation for this limitation by conceptualizing VWM as a system that balances between twoconflicting goals: keeping memory errors small and spiking activity low. We formalize this trade-off in a loss function andshow that minimization of loss dictates a strategy in which memory precision declines with the number of remembered items.Using psychophysical data from 67 human subjects in 5 delayed-estimation experiments, we show that this normative modelprovides an excellent account of human VWM limitations. These results suggest that human VWM implements an optimalcompromise between two conflicting ecological goals

In search of common risk alleles for prostate cancer that could contribute to high rates of the disease in men of African ancestry, we conducted a genome-wide association study, with 1,047,986 SNP markers examined in 3,425 African-Americans with prostate cancer (cases) and 3,290 African-American male controls. We followed up the most significant 17 new associations from stage 1 in 1,844 cases and 3,269 controls of African ancestry. We identified a new risk variant on chromosome 17q21 (rs7210100, odds ratio per allele = 1.51, P = 3.4 × 10(-13)). The frequency of the risk allele is ∼5% in men of African descent, whereas it is rare in other populations (