Blogs

Neglect your senses at your cognitive peril!

Submitted by Fiona McPherson on Mon, 03/05/2012 - 14:57

Untreated visual impairment significantly increases your risk of developing Alzheimer's or mild cognitive impairment.

Sensitivity to contrast appears to be an important factor underlying some instances of impaired cognitive function in older adults, adults with Parkinson's disease, and adults with Alzheimer's disease.

Contrast can be improved not only in reading material, but in living environments, and this produces significant benefits for all these groups.

Appropriate training may also help.

Other sensory impairments - hearing loss and failing sense of smell - have similarly been associated with greater risk of dementia.

Music training helps protect against age-related hearing problems.

Neglect (e.g. ignoring the messages from your senses) can be a factor in bringing about sensory deficits, and here training is particularly likely to be useful.

Impaired vision is common in old age and even more so in Alzheimer’s disease, and this results not only from damage in the association areas of the brain but also from problems in lower-level areas. A major factor in whether visual impairment impacts everyday function is contrast sensitivity.

Why good readers might have reading comprehension difficulties and how to deal with them

Submitted by Fiona McPherson on Sat, 02/18/2012 - 17:32

The limitations of working memory have implications for all of us. The challenges that come from having a low working memory capacity are not only relevant for particular individuals, but also for almost all of us at some points of our lives. Because working memory capacity has a natural cycle — in childhood it grows with age; in old age it begins to shrink. So the problems that come with a low working memory capacity, and strategies for dealing with it, are ones that all of us need to be aware of.

New topic index and pages

Submitted by Fiona McPherson on Fri, 02/17/2012 - 20:05

The main research page now has a category index for the Topic collections, and I've added three new collections in the category  How memory and the brain works:

Intelligence isn’t as important as you think

Submitted by Fiona McPherson on Fri, 02/10/2012 - 21:22

Intelligence is only one of many factors that explain individual differences in academic performance.

Conscientiousness, in particular Dutifulness, Achievement motivation, and Self-discipline, is another very important factor.

Intellectual Curiosity, which is related to both intelligence and conscientiousness, is a third.

More surprisingly, Greed Avoidance also appears to significantly predict academic performance.

Although these factors all account for an appreciable proportion of the variance in academic performance, all together they still only account for less than half of the differences between individuals.

Our society gives a lot of weight to intelligence. Academics may have been arguing for a hundred years over what, exactly, intelligence is, but ‘everyone knows’ what it means to be smart, and who is smart and who is not — right?

Of course, it’s not that simple, and the ins and outs of academic research have much to teach us about the nature of intelligence and its importance, even if they still haven’t got it all totally sorted yet. Today I want to talk about one particular aspect: how important intelligence is in academic success.

Decision-making, working memory, and age

Submitted by Fiona McPherson on Wed, 12/21/2011 - 16:44

In October I reported on a study that found older adults did better than younger adults on a decision-making task that reflected real-world situations more closely than most tasks used in such studies. It was concluded that, while (as previous research has shown) younger adults may do better on simple decision-making tasks, older adults have the edge when it comes to more complex scenarios. Unsurprisingly, this is where experience tells.

Why your knowledge of normal aging memory matters

Submitted by Fiona McPherson on Thu, 12/15/2011 - 23:21

I’ve discussed on a number of occasions the effects that stereotypes can have on our cognitive performance. Women, when subtly reminded that females are supposedly worse at math, do more poorly on math tests; African-Americans, when subtly reminded of racial stereotypes, perform more poorly on academic tests. And beliefs about the effect of aging similarly affect memory and cognition in older adults.

Physical activity & older adults

Submitted by Fiona McPherson on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 16:59

Because physical activity is important for preventing cognitive decline and dementia in older adults (see my article on physical activity and cognition and my article on helping prevent dementia through diet & exercise), and especially because I'm a sucker for infographics, I wanted to share with you this infographic on physical activity & older Americans from Evergreen Rehabilitation:

Practice counts! So does talent

Submitted by Fiona McPherson on Thu, 12/01/2011 - 20:43

Practice accounts for around half of the difference between individuals.

Working memory capacity accounts for a much smaller, but still significant, amount of the difference.

It makes sense that WMC would be more important in the early stages of acquiring expertise, but research has found that WMC does not, in general, appear to interact with practice or amount of knowledge. However, there may be some tasks for which WMC becomes less important as expertise increases.

Expertise should also allow you to functionally increase your WMC through the use of long-term working memory.

Personal attributes such as self-discipline and motivation are likely to affect number of hours of practice.

Individuals vary considerably in how many hours it takes them to achieve the same level of expertise.

One important factor behind this may be starting age — if you start to develop expertise in a domain before adolescence, when your brain is still structuring itself, you probably have a big advantage (although that may be more true of some domains than others).

It does not appear to be true that ‘extra’ IQ points over 120 make no real difference to personal achievement.

Attributing some differences to ‘genes’ is a misnomer. Environment interacts with genes, and what’s important is what is expressed. IQ is certainly affected by early environment, and perhaps WMC is too.

The thing to remember about Ericsson’s famous expertise research, showing us the vital importance of deliberate practice in making an expert, is that it was challenging the long-dominant view that natural-born talent is all-important. But Gladwell’s popularizing of Ericsson’s “10,000 hours” overstates the case, and of course people are only too keen to believe that any height is achievable if you just work hard enough.

New pages on aging

Submitted by Fiona McPherson on Tue, 11/22/2011 - 20:56

I've added a new summary page on age-related cogitive impairment, and new topic collections relating to age-related cognitive changes:

Even mild head injuries can seriously affect the brain

Submitted by Fiona McPherson on Fri, 11/18/2011 - 13:58

Traumatic brain injury is the biggest killer of young adults and children in the U.S., and in a year more Americans suffer a TBI than are diagnosed with breast, lung, prostate, brain and colon cancer combined. There are many causes of TBI, but one of the more preventable is that of sports concussion.

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