training

Video game training benefits cognition in some older adults

April, 2012

A study has found that playing a cognitively complex video game improved cognitive performance in some older adults, particularly those with initially poorer cognitive scores.

A number of studies have found evidence that older adults can benefit from cognitive training. However, neural plasticity is thought to decline with age, and because of this, it’s thought that the younger-old, and/or the higher-functioning, may benefit more than the older-old, or the lower-functioning. On the other hand, because their performance may already be as good as it can be, higher-functioning seniors may be less likely to benefit. You can find evidence for both of these views.

In a new study, 19 of 39 older adults (aged 60-77) were given training in a multiplayer online video game called World of Warcraft (the other 20 formed a control group). This game was chosen because it involves multitasking and switching between various cognitive abilities. It was theorized that the demands of the game would improve both spatial orientation and attentional control, and that the multiple tasks might produce more improvement in those with lower initial ability compared to those with higher ability.

WoW participants were given a 2-hour training session, involving a 1-hour lecture and demonstration, and one hour of practice. They were then expected to play the game at home for around 14 hours over the next two weeks. There was no intervention for the control group. All participants were given several cognitive tests at the beginning and end of the two week period: Mental Rotation Test; Stroop Test; Object Perspective Test; Progressive Matrices; Shipley Vocabulary Test; Everyday Cognition Battery; Digit Symbol Substitution Test.

As a group, the WoW group improved significantly more on the Stroop test (a measure of attentional control) compared to the control group. There was no change in the other tests. However, those in the WoW group who had performed more poorly on the Object Perspective Test (measuring spatial orientation) improved significantly. Similarly, on the Mental Rotation Test, ECB, and Progressive Matrices, those who performed more poorly at the beginning tended to improve after two weeks of training. There was no change on the Digit Symbol test.

The finding that only those whose performance was initially poor benefited from cognitive training is consistent with other studies suggesting that training only benefits those who are operating below par. This is not really surprising, but there are a few points that should be made.

First of all, it should be noted that this was a group of relatively high-functioning young-old adults — poorer performance in this case could be (relatively) better performance in another context. What it comes down to is whether you are operating at a level below which you are capable of — and this applies broadly, for example, experiments show that spatial training benefits females but not males (because males tend to already have practiced enough).

Given that, in expertise research, training has an on-going, apparently limitless, effect on performance, it seems likely that the limited benefits shown in this and other studies is because of the extremely limited scope of the training. Fourteen hours is not enough to improve people who are already performing adequately — but that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t improve with more hours. I have yet to see any interventions with older adults that give them the amount of cognitive training you would expect them to need to achieve some level of mastery.

My third and final point is the specific nature of the improvements. This has also been shown in other studies, and sometimes appears quite arbitrary — for example, one 3-D puzzle game apparently improved mental rotation, while a different 3-D puzzle game had no effect. The point being that we still don’t understand the precise attributes needed to improve different skills (although the researchers advocate the use of a tool called cognitive task analysis for revealing the underlying qualities of an activity) — but we do understand that it is a matter of precise attributes, which is definitely a step in the right direction.

The main thing, then, that you should take away from this is the idea that different activities involve specific cognitive tasks, and these, and only these, will be the ones that benefit from practicing the activities. You therefore need to think about what tasks you want to improve before deciding on the activities to practice.

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Music and sports training help spatial skills differently for men and women

March, 2012

While sports training benefits the spatial skills of both men and women, music training closes the gender gap by only helping women.

I talked recently about how the well-established difference in spatial ability between men and women apparently has a lot to do with confidence. I also mentioned in passing that previous research has shown that training can close the gender gap. A recent study suggests that this training may not have to be specific to spatial skills.

In the German study, 120 students were given a processing speed test and a standard mental rotation test. The students were evenly divided into three groups: musicians, athletes, and education students who didn’t participate in either sports or music.

While the expected gender gap was found among the education students, the gap was smaller among the sports students, and non-existent in the music students.

Among the education students, men got twice as many rotation problems correct as women. Among the sports students, both men and women did better than their peers in education, but since they were both about equally advantaged, a gender gap was still maintained. However, among the musicians, it was only women who benefited, bringing them up to the level of the men.

Thus, for males, athletes did best on mental rotation; for females, musicians did best.

Although it may be that those who went into music or sports had relevant “natural abilities”, the amount of training in sports/music did have a significant effect. Indeed, analysis found that the advantage of sports and music students disappeared when hours of practice and years of practicing were included.

Interestingly, too, there was an effect of processing speed. Although overall the three groups didn’t differ in processing speed, male musicians had a lower processing speed than female musicians, or male athletes (neither of which groups were significantly different from each other).

It is intriguing that music training should only benefit females’ spatial abilities. However, I’m reminded that in research showing how a few hours of video game training can help females close the gender gap, females benefited from the training far more than men. The obvious conclusion is that the males already had sufficient experience, and a few more hours were neither here nor there. Perhaps the question should rather be: why does sports practice benefit males’ spatial skills? A question that seems to point to the benefits for processing speed, but then we have to ask why sports didn’t have the same effect on women. One possible answer here is that the women had engaged in sports for a significantly shorter time (an average of 10.6 years vs 17.55), meaning that the males tended to begin their sports training at a much younger age. There was no such difference among the musicians.

(For more on spatial memory, see the aggregated news reports)

Reference: 

Pietsch, S., & Jansen, P. (2012). Different mental rotation performance in students of music, sport and education. Learning and Individual Differences, 22(1), 159-163. Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2011.11.012

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Gestures improve language learning

February, 2012

Those learning a new language benefit from making suitable gestures as they repeat new vocabulary, and this can even extend to gestures arbitrarily linked to abstract adverbs.

I always like gesture studies. I think I’m probably right in saying that they started with language learning. Way back in 1980 it was shown that acting out action phrases meant they were remembered better than if the phrases had been only heard or read (the “enactment effect”). Enacted items, it turned out, “popped out” effortlessly in free recall tests — in other words, enactment had made the phrases highly accessible. Subsequent research found that this effect occurred both for both older and younger adults, and in immediate and delayed recall tests — suggesting not only that such items are more accessible but that forgetting is slower.

Following these demonstrations, there have been a few studies that have specifically looked at the effect of gestures on learning foreign languages, which have confirmed the benefits of gestures. But there are various confounding factors that are hard to remove when using natural languages, which is why the present researchers have developed an artificial language (“Vimmi”) to use in their research. In their first study, as in most other studies, the words and phrases used related to actions. In a new study, the findings were extended to more abstract vocabulary.

In this study, 20 German-speakers participated in a six-day language class to study Vimmi. The training material included 32 sentences, each containing a subject, verb, adverb, and object. While the subject nouns were concrete agents (e.g., musician, director), the other words were all abstract. Here’s a couple of sample sentences (translated, obviously): (The) designer frequently shapes (the) style. (The) pilot really enjoys (the) view. The length of the words was controlled: nouns all had 3 syllables; verbs and adverbs all had two.

For 16 of the sentences, participants saw the word in Vimmi and heard it. The translation of the word appeared on the screen fractionally later, while at the same time a video appeared in which woman performed the gesture relating to the word. The audio of the word was replayed, and participants were cued to imitate the gesture as they repeated the word. For the other 16 sentences, a video with a still image of the actress appeared, and the participants were simply cued to repeat the word when the audio was replayed.

While many of the words used gestures similar to their meaning (such as a cutting gesture for the word “cut”), the researchers found that the use of any gesture made a difference as long as it was unique and connected to a specific word. For example, the abstract word “rather” does not have an obvious gesture that would go with it. However, a gesture attached to this word also worked.

Each daily session lasted three hours. From day 2, sessions began with a free recall and a cued recall test. In the free recall test, participants were asked to write as many items as possible in both German and Vimmi. Items had to be perfectly correct to be counted. From day 4, participants were also required to produce new sentences with the words they had learned.

Right from the beginning, free recall of items which had been enacted was superior to those which hadn’t been — in German. However, in Vimmi, significant benefits from enactment occurred only from day 3. The main problem here was not forgetting the items, but correctly spelling them. In the cued recall test (translating from Vimmi to German, or German to Vimmi), again, the superiority of the enactment condition only showed up from day 3.

Perhaps the most interesting result came from the written production test. Here, people reproduced the same number of sentences they had learned on each of the three days of the test, and although enacted words were remembered at a higher rate, that rate didn’t alter, and didn’t reach significance. However, the production of new sentences improved each day, and the benefits of enactment increased each day. These benefits were significant from day 5.

The main question, however, was whether the benefits of enactment depended on word category. As expected, concrete nouns were remembered than verbs, followed by abstract nouns, and finally adverbs. When all the tests were lumped together, there was a significant benefit of enactment for all types of word. However, the situation became a little more nuanced when the data was separately analyzed.

In free recall, for Vimmi, enactment was only of significant benefit for concrete nouns and verbs. In cued recall, for translating German into Vimmi, the enactment benefit was significant for all except concrete nouns (I’m guessing concrete nouns have enough ‘natural’ power not to need gestures in this situation). For translating Vimmi into German, the benefit was only significant for verbs and abstract nouns. In new sentence production, interestingly, participants used significantly more items of all four categories if they had been enacted. This is perhaps the best evidence that enactment makes items more accessible in memory.

What all this suggests is that acting out new words helps you learn them, but some types of words may benefit more from this strategy than others. But I think we need more research before being sure about such subtleties. The pattern of results make it clear that we really need longer training, and longer delays, to get a better picture of the most effective way to use this strategy.

For example, it may be that adverbs, although they showed the most inconsistent benefits, are potentially the category that stands to gain the most from this strategy — because they are the hardest type of word to remember. Because any embodiment of such an abstract adverb must be arbitrary — symbolic rather than representational — it naturally is going to be harder to learn (yes, some adverbs could be represented, but the ones used in this study, and the ones I am talking about, are of the “rather”, “really”, “otherwise” ilk). But if you persist in learning the association between concept and gesture, you may derive greater benefit from enactment than you would from easier words, which need less help.

Here’s a practical discussion of all this from a language teacher’s perspective.

Reference: 

[2688] Macedonia, M., & Knösche T. R.
(2011).  Body in Mind: How Gestures Empower Foreign Language Learning.
Mind, Brain, and Education. 5(4), 196 - 211.

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Music training protects against aging-related hearing loss

February, 2012

More evidence that music training protects older adults from age-related impairment in understanding speech, adding to the potential benefits of music training in preventing dementia.

I’ve spoken before about the association between hearing loss in old age and dementia risk. Although we don’t currently understand that association, it may be that preventing hearing loss also helps prevent cognitive decline and dementia. I have previously reported on how music training in childhood can help older adults’ ability to hear speech in a noisy environment. A new study adds to this evidence.

The study looked at a specific aspect of understanding speech: auditory brainstem timing. Aging disrupts this timing, degrading the ability to precisely encode sound.

In this study, automatic brain responses to speech sounds were measured in 87 younger and older normal-hearing adults as they watched a captioned video. It was found that older adults who had begun musical training before age 9 and engaged consistently in musical activities through their lives (“musicians”) not only significantly outperformed older adults who had no more than three years of musical training (“non-musicians”), but encoded the sounds as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians.

The researchers qualify this finding by saying that it shows only that musical experience selectively affects the timing of sound elements that are important in distinguishing one consonant from another, not necessarily all sound elements. However, it seems probable that it extends more widely, and in any case the ability to understand speech is crucial to social interaction, which may well underlie at least part of the association between hearing loss and dementia.

The burning question for many will be whether the benefits of music training can be accrued later in life. We will have to wait for more research to answer that, but, as music training and enjoyment fit the definition of ‘mentally stimulating activities’, this certainly adds another reason to pursue such a course.

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Intelligence

Older news items (pre-2010) brought over from the old website

Aerobic fitness boosts IQ in teenage boys

Data from the 1.2 million Swedish men born between 1950 and 1976 who enlisted for mandatory military service at the age of 18 has revealed that on every measure of cognitive performance, average test scores increased according to aerobic fitness — but not muscle strength. The link was strongest for logical thinking and verbal comprehension, and the association was restricted to cardiovascular fitness. The results of the study also underline the importance of getting healthier between the ages of 15 and 18 while the brain is still changing — those who improved their cardiovascular health between 15 and 18 showed significantly greater intelligence scores than those who became less healthy over the same time period. Those who were fittest at 18 were also more likely to go to college. Although association doesn’t prove cause, the fact that the association was only with cardiovascular fitness and not strength supports a cardiovascular effect on brain function. Results from over 260,000 full-sibling pairs, over 3,000 sets of twins, and more than 1,400 sets of identical twins, also supports a causal relationship.

[1486] Åberg, M AI., Pedersen N. L., Torén K., Svartengren M., Bäckstrand B., Johnsson T., et al.
(2009).  Cardiovascular fitness is associated with cognition in young adulthood.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 106(49), 20906 - 20911.

http://www.physorg.com/news179415275.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6692474/Physical-health-leads-to-mental-health.html

Confidence as important as IQ in exam success

I’ve talked repeatedly about the effects of self-belief on memory and cognition. One important area in which this is true is that of academic achievement. Evidence indicates that your perceived abilities matter, just as much? more than? your actual abilities. It has been assumed that self perceived abilities, self-confidence if you will, is a product mainly of nurture. Now a new twin study provides evidence that nurture / environment may only provide half the story; the other half may lie in the genes. The study involved 1966 pairs of identical twins and 1877 pairs of fraternal twins. The next step is to tease out which of these genes are related to IQ and which to personality variables.

[1080] Greven, C. U., Harlaar N., Kovas Y., Chamorro-Premuzic T., & Plomin R.
(2009).  More Than Just IQ: School Achievement Is Predicted by Self-Perceived Abilities—But for Genetic Rather Than Environmental Reasons.
Psychological Science. 20(6), 753 - 762.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17187-confidence-as-important-as-iq-in-exam-success.html

Children of older fathers perform less well in intelligence tests during infancy

Reanalysis of a dataset of over 33,000 children born between 1959 and 1965 and tested at 8 months, 4 years, and 7 years, has revealed that the older the father, the more likely the child was to have lower scores on the various tests used to measure the ability to think and reason, including concentration, learning, memory, speaking and reading skills. In contrast, the older the mother, the higher the scores of the child in the cognitive tests.

[1447] Saha, S., Barnett A. G., Foldi C., Burne T. H., Eyles D. W., Buka S. L., et al.
(2009).  Advanced Paternal Age Is Associated with Impaired Neurocognitive Outcomes during Infancy and Childhood.
PLoS Med. 6(3), e1000040 - e1000040.

Full text available at http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000040

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-03/plos-coo030309.php

Brain-training to improve working memory boosts fluid intelligence

General intelligence is often separated into "fluid" and "crystalline" components, of which fluid intelligence is considered more reflective of “pure” intelligence (for more on this, see my article), and largely resistant to training and learning effects. However, in a new study in which participants were given a series of training exercises designed to improve their working memory, fluid intelligence was found to have significantly improved, with the amount of improvement increasing with time spent training. The small study contradicts decades of research showing that improving on one kind of cognitive task does not improve performance on other kinds, so has been regarded with some skepticism by other researchers. More research is definitely needed, but the memory task did differ from previous studies, engaging executive functions such as those that inhibit irrelevant items, monitor performance, manage two tasks simultaneously, and update memory.

[1183] Jaeggi, S. M., Buschkuehl M., Jonides J., & Perrig W. J.
(2008).  From the Cover: Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 105(19), 6829 - 6833.

http://www.physorg.com/news128699895.html
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=study-shows-brain-power-can-be-bolstered

Effect of schooling on achievement gaps within racial groups

Analysis of data from a national sample (U.S.) of 8,060 students, collected at four points in time, starting in kindergarten and ending in the spring of fifth grade, has found evidence that education has an impact in closing the achievement gap for substantial numbers of children. High-performing groups in reading were found among all races. About 30% of European Americans, 26% of African Americans and 45% of Asian Americans were in high-achieving groups by the spring of fifth grade — these groups included approximately 23% of African American children and 36% of Asian children who caught up with the initial group of high achievers over time. Only around 4% of European American students were in catch-up groups, because a higher percentage of European Americans started kindergarten as high achievers in reading. The situation was different for Hispanic students, however.  By the end of fifth grade, just over 5% of Hispanic children were high achievers in reading, while the remainder tested in the middle range. There were no low achievers and no catch-up groups. A different pattern was found in math. Only 17% of European American students were high-achievers in math by the end of fifth grade, including 13% who started kindergarten at a lower achievement level and caught up over time.  About 18% of Asian Americans were high-achievers at the end of fifth grade (11% catch-up). Only 0.3% of African Americans were high achievers at the end of fifth grade, and 26% were medium-high achievers. But about 16% of Hispanics were high achievers in math. There were no catch-up groups for either the African Americans or the Hispanics. This suggests that current schooling doesn't have as strong an impact on math achievement as it does in reading.

The study was presented in Washington, D.C. at the 2008 annual meeting of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness.

http://www.physorg.com/news123859991.html

Autism non-verbal not unintelligent

New findings suggest that the association of autism with low intelligence is a product of their language difficulties. Testing autistic kids and normal kids on two popular IQ tests — the WISC (which relies heavily on language) and Raven's Progressive Matrices (considered the best test of "fluid intelligence", and a test that doesn't require much language) found that while not a single autistic child scored in the "high intelligence" range of the WISC, a third did on the Raven's. A third of the autistics had WISC scores in the mentally retarded range, but only one in 20 scored that low on the Raven's test. The non-autistic children scored similarly on both tests. The same results occurred when the experiment was run on autistic and normal adults.

[580] Dawson, M., Soulières I., Gernsbacher M A., & Mottron L.
(2007).  The level and nature of autistic intelligence.
Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society / APS. 18(8), 657 - 662.

http://www.physorg.com/news105376203.html
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/afps-tmo080307.php

Being treated as oldest linked to IQ

The question of whether there is an IQ advantage to being the first-born has long been debated. Now analysis of IQ test results of 241,310 Norwegians drafted into the armed forces between 1967 and 1976 has revealed that the average IQ of first-born men was 103.2 while second-born men averaged 101.2 and third-borns, 100.0. However, second-born men whose older sibling died in infancy scored 102.9, and if both older siblings died young, the third-born score rose to 102.6. This suggests the advantage lies in the social rank in the family and not birth order as such.

[589] Kristensen, P., & Bjerkedal T.
(2007).  Explaining the Relation Between Birth Order and Intelligence.
Science. 316(5832), 1717 - 1717.

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070618/full/070618-14.html

Executive function as important as IQ for math success

A study of 141 preschoolers from low-income homes has found that a child whose IQ and executive functioning were both above average was three times more likely to succeed in math than a child who simply had a high IQ. The parts of executive function that appear to be particularly linked to math ability in preschoolers are working memory and inhibitory control. In this context, working memory may be thought of as the ability to keep information or rules in mind while performing mental tasks. Inhibitory control is the ability to halt automatic impulses and focus on the problem at hand. Inhibitory control was also important for reading ability. The finding offers the hope that training to improve executive function will improve academic performance.

[1256] Blair, C., & Razza R P.
(2007).  Relating Effortful Control, Executive Function, and False Belief Understanding to Emerging Math and Literacy Ability in Kindergarten.
Child Development. 78(2), 647 - 663.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=90377FAE-E7F2-99DF-3A1204FC5F2BF0F7

Students who believe intelligence can be developed perform better

Research with 12-year-olds has found that, although all students began the study with equivalent achievement levels in math, over a two year period, those who believed that intelligence was malleable increasingly did better than those who believed their intelligence was fixed. Another study found that, when students showing declines in their math grades were taught that intelligence could be increased, they reversed their decline and showed significantly higher math grades than others who weren’t taught that.

[1123] Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski K. H., & Dweck C S.
(2007).  Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention.
Child Development. 78(1), 246 - 263.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-02/sfri-swb013107.php

Implicit stereotypes and gender identification may affect female math performance

Relatedly, another study has come out showing that women enrolled in an introductory calculus course who possessed strong implicit gender stereotypes, (for example, automatically associating "male" more than "female" with math ability and math professions) and were likely to identify themselves as feminine, performed worse relative to their female counterparts who did not possess such stereotypes and who were less likely to identify with traditionally female characteristics. Strikingly, a majority of the women participating in the study explicitly expressed disagreement with the idea that men have superior math ability, suggesting that even when consciously disavowing stereotypes, female math students are still susceptible to negative perceptions of their ability.

[969] Kiefer, A. K., & Sekaquaptewa D.
(2007).  Implicit stereotypes, gender identification, and math-related outcomes: a prospective study of female college students.
Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society / APS. 18(1), 13 - 18.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-01/afps-isa012407.php

Reducing the racial achievement gap

And staying with the same theme, a study that came out six months ago, and recently reviewed on the excellent new Scientific American Mind Matters blog, revealed that a single, 15-minute intervention erased almost half the racial achievement gap between African American and white students. The intervention involved writing a brief paragraph about which value, from a list of values, was most important to them and why. The intervention improved subsequent academic performance for some 70% of the African American students, but none of the Caucasians. The study was repeated the following year with the same results. It is thought that the effect of the intervention was to protect against the negative stereotypes regarding the intelligence and academic capabilities of African Americans.

[1082] Cohen, G. L., Garcia J., Apfel N., & Master A.
(2006).  Reducing the Racial Achievement Gap: A Social-Psychological Intervention.
Science. 313(5791), 1307 - 1310.

Fitness and childhood IQ indicators of cognitive ability in old age

Data from the Scottish Mental Survey of 1932 has revealed that physical fitness contributed more than 3% of the differences in cognitive ability in old age. The study involved 460 men and women, who were tested using the same cognitive test at age 79 that they had undergone at age 11. Physical fitness was defined by time to walk six meters, grip strength and lung function. Childhood IQ was also significantly related to lung function at age 79, perhaps because people with higher intelligence might respond more favorably to health messages about staying fit. But physical fitness was more important for cognitive ability in old age than childhood IQ. People in more professional occupations and with more education also had better fitness and higher cognitive test scores at 79.

[770] Deary, I. J., Whalley L. J., Batty D. G., & Starr J. M.
(2006).  Physical fitness and lifetime cognitive change.
Neurology. 67(7), 1195 - 1200.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-10/aaon-fac100306.php

Black-white IQ gap has narrowed

Data now available suggests that Black Americans have gained an average of .18 IQ points a year on White Americans from 1972 to 2002 for a total gain of 5.4 IQ points.

[929] Dickens, W. T., & Flynn J. R.
(2006).  Black Americans reduce the racial IQ gap: evidence from standardization samples.
Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society / APS. 17(10), 913 - 920.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-09/afps-big091206.php

Does IQ drop with age or does something else impact intelligence?

As people grow older, their IQ scores drop. But is it really that they lose intelligence? A study has found that if college students had to perform under conditions that mimic the perception deficits many older people have, their IQ scores would also take a drop.

[234] Gilmore, G. C., Spinks R. A., & Thomas C. W.
(2006).  Age effects in coding tasks: componential analysis and test of the sensory deficit hypothesis.
Psychology and Aging. 21(1), 7 - 18.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-05/cwru-did050106.php

Smarter kids may live longer

A prospective study that recruited 897 individuals who scored 135 or higher on the Stanford-Binet IQ test in 1922 has found that higher IQs were associated with longevity, with the survival advantage leveling off after a childhood IQ of 163. The association was independent of childhood social position (as measured by father’s occupation). The study confirms earlier research suggesting an association between IQ and mortality, and provides the new finding of where the cut-off point (when high IQ no longer brought additional health benefits) appears — the cutoff of 163 was much higher than expected. Suggested reasons for the association (all of which may well be valid) include: greater tendency to adopt healthy habits and avoid bad ones; increased probability of better jobs; better skills for managing their health and the health-care system.

[690] Martin, L. T., & Kubzansky L. D.
(2005).  Childhood Cognitive Performance and Risk of Mortality: A Prospective Cohort Study of Gifted Individuals.
Am. J. Epidemiol.. 162(9), 887 - 890.

http://health.yahoo.com/news/126478

Growing up in a chaotic home may impair child's cognitive development

An association between disorganized, noisy and cramped homes and lower childhood intelligence has been observed before, but the reasons for the association have never been clear. Now a study of some 8000 3- and 4-year-old twins has perhaps disentangled the variables, and has found that chaos had an influence on cognitive skills independent of socioeconomic status. The findings also suggest that when the environment is more stressful, intelligence is more likely to be constrained by genes.

[570] Petrill, S. A., Pike A., Price T., & Plomin R.
(Submitted).  Chaos in the home and socioeconomic status are associated with cognitive development in early childhood: Environmental mediators identified in a genetic design.
Intelligence. 32(5), 445 - 460.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996323

Early music instruction raises child’s IQ

A new study confirms earlier research supporting the benefits of early music instruction. The study involved 144 children, 6 years old at the start of the study. They were given free weekly voice or piano lessons at the Royal Conservatory of Music. Another group of 6-year-olds was given free training in weekly drama classes, while a fourth group received no extra classes during the study period. Before any classes were given, all the children were tested using the full Weschler intelligence test. At the end of the school year (their first school year), the children were retested. All had an IQ increase of at least 4.3 points on average (a consequence of going to school). Children who took drama lessons scored no higher than those who had no extra lessons, but those who took music lessons scored on average 2.7 points higher than the children who did not take music lessons. Those in the drama group did however show substantial improvement in adaptive social behavior.

[1009] Schellenberg, E. Glenn
(2004).  Music lessons enhance IQ.
Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society / APS. 15(8), 511 - 514.

http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.htm3?article_id=218392326

Knowledge-based IQ test predicts work performance as well as school

A meta-analysis of 127 studies supports the view that the Miller Analogies Test (MAT) — a knowledge-based test used for admissions decisions into U.S. graduate schools as well as in hiring and promotion decisions in the workplace since 1926 — is predictive of performance in both the academic and workplace environments. Specifically, MAT was a valid predictor of seven of the eight measures of graduate student performance, five of the six school-to-work transition performance criteria, and all four of the work performance criteria. MAT is assumed to measure “g”, the oft-debated “general intelligence” factor.

[1109] Kuncel, N. R., Hezlett S. A., & Ones D. S.
(2004).  Academic Performance, Career Potential, Creativity, and Job Performance: Can One Construct Predict Them All?.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 86(1), 148 - 161.

Support for "general intelligence" factor

Researchers into intelligence and memory have always concentrated on verbal abilities — for the good reason that they are considerably easier to test. New research suggests that strong visuospatial skills and working memory may be at least as good as verbal skills and working memory as indicators of general intelligence. The study, involving 167 subjects, found a clear relationship between being good at complex visuospatial tasks, and being good at tasks involving the so-called “central executive” (which coordinates tasks, sets goals, etc). The study lends support both to the view that intelligence has both discrete components and a general aspect, and that this “general intelligence” may be related to executive functioning.

[1152] Miyake, A., Friedman N. P., Rettinger D. A., Shah P., & Hegarty M.
(2001).  How are visuospatial working memory, executive functioning, and spatial abilities related? A latent-variable analysis.
Journal of Experimental Psychology. General. 130(4), 621 - 640.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-12/apa-npo121001.php

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Reviving a failing sense of smell through training

January, 2012

A rat study reveals how training can improve or impair smell perception.

The olfactory bulb is in the oldest part of our brain. It connects directly to the amygdala (our ‘emotion center’) and our prefrontal cortex, giving smells a more direct pathway to memory than our other senses. But the olfactory bulb is only part of the system processing smells. It projects to several other regions, all of which are together called the primary olfactory cortex, and of which the most prominent member is the piriform cortex. More recently, however, it has been suggested that it would be more useful to regard the olfactory bulb as the primary olfactory cortex (primary in the sense that it is first), while the piriform cortex should be regarded as association cortex — meaning that it integrates sensory information with ‘higher-order’ (cognitive, contextual, and behavioral) information.

Testing this hypothesis, a new rat study has found that, when rats were given training to distinguish various odors, each smell produced a different pattern of electrical activity in the olfactory bulb. However, only those smells that the rat could distinguish from others were reflected in distinct patterns of brain activity in the anterior piriform cortex, while smells that the rat couldn’t differentiate produced identical brain activity patterns there. Interestingly, the smells that the rats could easily distinguish were ones in which one of the ten components in the target odor had been replaced with a new component. The smells they found difficult to distinguish were those in which a component had simply been deleted.

When a new group of rats was given additional training (8 days vs the 2 days given the original group), they eventually learned to discriminate between the odors the first animals couldn’t distinguish, and this was reflected in distinct patterns of brain activity in the anterior piriform cortex. When a third group were taught to ignore the difference between odors the first rats could readily distinguish, they became unable to tell the odors apart, and similar patterns of brain activity were produced in the piriform cortex.

The effects of training were also quite stable — they were still evident after two weeks.

These findings support the idea of the piriform cortex as association cortex. It is here that experience modified neuronal activity. In the olfactory bulb, where all the various odors were reflected in different patterns of activity right from the beginning (meaning that this part of the brain could discriminate between odors that the rat itself couldn’t distinguish), training made no difference to the patterns of activity.

Having said that, it should be noted that this is not entirely consistent with previous research. Several studies have found that odor training produces changes in the representations in the olfactory bulb. The difference may lie in the method of neural recording.

How far does this generalize to the human brain? Human studies have suggested that odors are represented in the posterior piriform cortex rather than the anterior piriform cortex. They have also suggested that the anterior piriform cortex is involved in expectations relating to the smells, rather than representing the smells themselves. Whether these differences reflect species differences, task differences, or methodological differences, remains to be seen.

But whether or not the same exact regions are involved, there are practical implications we can consider. The findings do suggest that one road to olfactory impairment is through neglect — if you learn to ignore differences between smells, you will become increasingly less able to do so. An impaired sense of smell has been found in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, and even normal aging. While some of that may well reflect impairment earlier in the perception process, some of it may reflect the consequences of neglect. The burning question is, then, would it be possible to restore smell function through odor training?

I’d really like to see this study replicated with old rats.

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Latest London taxi driver study shows brain changes driven by learning

January, 2012
  • A comparison of the brains of London taxi drivers before and after their lengthy training shows clearly that the increase in hippocampal gray matter develops with training, but this may come at the expense of other brain functions.

The evidence that adult brains could grow new neurons was a game-changer, and has spawned all manner of products to try and stimulate such neurogenesis, to help fight back against age-related cognitive decline and even dementia. An important study in the evidence for the role of experience and training in growing new neurons was Maguire’s celebrated study of London taxi drivers, back in 2000.

The small study, involving 16 male, right-handed taxi drivers with an average experience of 14.3 years (range 1.5 to 42 years), found that the taxi drivers had significantly more grey matter (neurons) in the posterior hippocampus than matched controls, while the controls showed relatively more grey matter in the anterior hippocampus. Overall, these balanced out, so that the volume of the hippocampus as a whole wasn’t different for the two groups. The volume in the right posterior hippocampus correlated with the amount of experience the driver had (the correlation remained after age was accounted for).

The posterior hippocampus is preferentially involved in spatial navigation. The fact that only the right posterior hippocampus showed an experience-linked increase suggests that the right and left posterior hippocampi are involved in spatial navigation in different ways. The decrease in anterior volume suggests that the need to store increasingly detailed spatial maps brings about a reorganization of the hippocampus.

But (although the experience-related correlation is certainly indicative) it could be that those who manage to become licensed taxi drivers in London are those who have some innate advantage, evidenced in a more developed posterior hippocampus. Only around half of those who go through the strenuous training program succeed in qualifying — London taxi drivers are unique in the world for being required to pass through a lengthy training period and pass stringent exams, demonstrating their knowledge of London’s 25,000 streets and their idiosyncratic layout, plus 20,000 landmarks.

In this new study, Maguire and her colleague made a more direct test of this question. 79 trainee taxi drivers and 31 controls took cognitive tests and had their brains scanned at two time points: at the beginning of training, and 3-4 years later. Of the 79 would-be taxi drivers, only 39 qualified, giving the researchers three groups to compare.

There were no differences in cognitive performance or brain scans between the three groups at time 1 (before training). At time 2 however, when the trainees had either passed the test or failed to acquire the Knowledge, those trainees that qualified had significantly more gray matter in the posterior hippocampus than they had had previously. There was no change in those who failed to qualify or in the controls.

Unsurprisingly, both qualified and non-qualified trainees were significantly better at judging the spatial relations between London landmarks than the control group. However, qualified trainees – but not the trainees who failed to qualify – were worse than the other groups at recalling a complex visual figure after 30 minutes (see here for an example of such a figure). Such a finding replicates previous findings of London taxi drivers. In other words, their improvement in spatial memory as it pertains to London seems to have come at a cost.

Interestingly, there was no detectable difference in the structure of the anterior hippocampus, suggesting that these changes develop later, in response to changes in the posterior hippocampus. However, the poorer performance on the complex figure test may be an early sign of changes in the anterior hippocampus that are not yet measurable in a MRI.

The ‘Knowledge’, as it is known, provides a lovely real-world example of expertise. Unlike most other examples of expertise development (e.g. music, chess), it is largely unaffected by childhood experience (there may be some London taxi drivers who began deliberately working on their knowledge of London streets in childhood, but it is surely not common!); it is developed through a training program over a limited time period common to all participants; and its participants are of average IQ and education (average school-leaving age was around 16.7 years for all groups; average verbal IQ was around or just below 100).

So what underlies this development of the posterior hippocampus? If the qualified and non-qualified trainees were comparable in education and IQ, what determined whether a trainee would ‘build up’ his hippocampus and pass the exams? The obvious answer is hard work / dedication, and this is borne out by the fact that, although the two groups were similar in the length of their training period, those who qualified spent significantly more time training every week (an average of 34.5 hours a week vs 16.7 hours). Those who qualified also attended far more tests (an average of 15.6 vs 2.6).

While neurogenesis is probably involved in this growth within the posterior hippocampus, it is also possible that growth reflects increases in the number of connections, or in the number of glia. Most probably (I think), all are involved.

There are two important points to take away from this study. One is its clear demonstration that training can produce measurable changes in a brain region. The other is the indication that this development may come at the expense of other regions (and functions).

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Music training and language skills

November, 2011

A month-long music-based program produced dramatic improvement in preschoolers’ language skills. Another study helps explain why music training helps language skills.

Music-based training 'cartoons' improved preschoolers’ verbal IQ

A study in which 48 preschoolers (aged 4-6) participated in computer-based, cognitive training programs that were projected on a classroom wall and featured colorful, animated cartoon characters delivering the lessons, has found that 90% of those who received music-based training significantly improved their scores on a test of verbal intelligence, while those who received visual art-based training did not.

The music-based training involved a combination of motor, perceptual and cognitive tasks, and included training on rhythm, pitch, melody, voice and basic musical concepts. Visual art training emphasized the development of visuo-spatial skills relating to concepts such as shape, color, line, dimension and perspective. Each group received two one-hour training sessions each day in classroom, over four weeks.

Children’s abilities and brain function were tested before the training and five to 20 days after the end of the programs. While there were no significant changes, in the brain or in performance, in the children who participated in the visual art training, nearly all of those who took the music-based training showed large improvements on a measure of vocabulary knowledge, as well as increased accuracy and reaction time. These correlated with changes in brain function.

The findings add to the growing evidence for the benefits of music training for intellectual development, especially in language.

Musical aptitude relates to reading ability through sensitivity to sound patterns

Another new study points to one reason for the correlation between music training and language acquisition. In the study, 42 children (aged 8-13) were tested on their ability to read and recognize words, as well as their auditory working memory (remembering a sequence of numbers and then being able to quote them in reverse), and musical aptitude (both melody and rhythm). Brain activity was also measured.

It turned out that both music aptitude and literacy were related to the brain’s response to acoustic regularities in speech, as well as auditory working memory and attention. Compared to good readers, poor readers had reduced activity in the auditory brainstem to rhythmic rather than random sounds. Responsiveness to acoustic regularities correlated with both reading ability and musical aptitude. Musical ability (largely driven by performance in rhythm) was also related to reading ability, and auditory working memory to both of these.

It was calculated that music skill, through the functions it shares with reading (brainstem responsiveness to auditory regularities and auditory working memory) accounts for 38% of the difference in reading ability between children.

These findings are consistent with previous findings that auditory working memory is an important component of child literacy, and that positive correlations exist between auditory working memory and musical skill.

Basically what this is saying, is that the auditory brainstem (a subcortical region — that is, below the cerebral cortex, where our ‘higher-order’ functions are carried out) is boosting the experience of predictable speech in better readers. This fine-tuning may reflect stronger top-down control in those with better musical ability and reading skills. While there may be some genetic contribution, previous research makes it clear that musicians’ increased sensitivity to sound patterns is at least partly due to training.

In other words, giving young children music training is a good first step to literacy.

The children were rated as good readers if they scored 110 or above on the Test of Word Reading Efficiency, and poor readers if they scored 90 or below. There were 8 good readers and 21 poor readers. Those 13 who scored in the middle were excluded from group analyses. Good and poor readers didn’t differ in age, gender, maternal education, years of musical training, extent of extracurricular activity, or nonverbal IQ. Only 6 of the 42 children had had at least a year of musical training (of which one was a poor reader, three were average, and two were good).

Auditory brainstem responses were gathered to the speech sound /da/, which was either presented with 100% probability, or randomly interspersed with seven other speech sounds. The children heard these sounds through an earpiece in the right ear, while they listened to the soundtrack of a chosen video with the other ear.

Reference: 

[2603] Moreno, S., Bialystok E., Barac R., Schellenberg E. Glenn, Cepeda N. J., & Chau T.
(2011).  Short-Term Music Training Enhances Verbal Intelligence and Executive Function.
Psychological Science. 22(11), 1425 - 1433.

Strait, Dana L, Jane Hornickel, and Nina Kraus. “Subcortical processing of speech regularities underlies reading and music aptitude in children.” Behavioral and brain functions : BBF 7, no. 1 (October 17, 2011): 44. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22005291.

Full text is available at http://www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com/content/pdf/1744-9081-7-44.pd...

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Attention

See separate pages for

Attention problems

Attention training

Older news items (pre-2010) brought over from the old website

Attention is more about reducing the noticeability of the unattended

No visual scene can be processed in one fell swoop — we piece it together from the bits we pay attention to (which explains why we sometimes miss objects completely, and can’t understood how we could have missed them when we finally notice them). We know that paying attention to something increases the firing rate of neurons tuned for that type of stimulus, and until a recent study we thought that was the main process underlying our improved perception when we focus on something. However a macaque study has found that the main cause — perhaps four times as important — is a reduction in the background noise, allowing the information coming in to be much more noticeable.

[1093] Mitchell, J. F., Sundberg K. A., & Reynolds J. H.
(2009).  Spatial Attention Decorrelates Intrinsic Activity Fluctuations in Macaque Area V4.
Neuron. 63(6), 879 - 888.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/09/23/rising.above.din

Brainwaves regulate our searching

A long-standing question concerns how we search complex visual scenes. For example, when you enter a crowded room, how do you go about searching for your friends? Now a monkey study reveals that visual attention jumps sequentially from point to point, shifting focus around 25 times in a second. Intriguingly, and unexpectedly, it seems this timing is determined by brainwaves. The finding connects speed of thinking with the oscillation frequency of brainwaves, giving a new significance to brainwaves (whose function is rather mysterious, but of increasing interest to researchers), and also suggesting an innovative approach to improving attention.

[1118] Buschman, T. J., & Miller E. K.
(2009).  Serial, Covert Shifts of Attention during Visual Search Are Reflected by the Frontal Eye Fields and Correlated with Population Oscillations.
Neuron. 63(3), 386 - 396.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-08/miot-tme080609.php

Ability to ignore distraction most important for attention

Confirming an earlier study, a series of four experiments involving 84 students has found that students with high working memory capacity were noticeably better able to ignore distractions and stay focused on their tasks. The findings provide more evidence that the poor attentional capacity of individuals with low working memory capacity result from a reduced ability to ignore attentional capture (stimuli that involuntarily “capture” your attention, like a loud noise or a suddenly appearing object), rather than an inability to focus.

[828] Fukuda, K., & Vogel E. K.
(2009).  Human Variation in Overriding Attentional Capture.
J. Neurosci.. 29(27), 8726 - 8733.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-08/uoo-bbo080609.php

Stress disrupts task-switching, but the brain can bounce back

A new neuroimaging study involving 20 male M.D. candidates in the middle of preparing for their board exams has found that they had a harder time shifting their attention from one task to another after a month of stress than other healthy young men who were not under stress. The finding replicates what has been found in rat studies, and similarly correlates with impaired function in an area of the prefrontal cortex that is involved in attention. However, the brains recovered their function within a month of the end of the stressful period.

[829] Liston, C., McEwen B. S., & Casey B. J.
(2009).  Psychosocial stress reversibly disrupts prefrontal processing and attentional control.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 106(3), 912 - 917.

Full text available at http://www.pnas.org/content/106/3/912.abstract
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/ru-sdh012709.php

Attention, it’s all about connecting

An imaging study in which volunteers spent an hour identifying letters that flashed on a screen has shed light on what happens when our attention wanders. Reduced communication in the ventral fronto-parietal network, critical for attention, was found to predict slower response times 5-8 seconds before the letters were presented.

Daniel Weissman presented the results at the 38th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held Nov. 15 to 19 in Washington, DC.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026865.600-bored-your-brain-is-disconnecting.html

The importance of acetylcholine

A rat study suggests that acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter known to be important for attention, is critical for "feature binding"— the process by which our brain combines all of the specific features of an object and gives us a complete and unified picture of it. The findings may lead to improved therapies and treatments for a variety of attention and memory disorders.

[1265] Botly, L. C. P. [1], & De Rosa E.
(2008).  A Cross-Species Investigation of Acetylcholine, Attention, and Feature Binding.
Psychological Science. 19, 1185 - 1193.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-11/afps-bba111808.php

Attention grabbers snatch lion's share of visual memory

It’s long been thought that when we look at a visually "busy" scene, we are only able to store a very limited number of objects in our visual short-term or working memory. For some time, this figure was believed to be four or five objects, but a recent report suggested it could be as low as two. However, a new study reveals that although it might not be large, it’s more flexible than we thought. Rather than being restricted to a limited number of objects, it can be shared out across the whole image, with more memory allocated for objects of interest and less for background detail. What’s of interest might be something we’ve previously decided on (i.e., we’re searching for), or something that grabs our attention.  Eye movements also reveal how brief our visual memory is, and that what our eyes are looking at isn’t necessarily what we’re ‘seeing’ — when people were asked to look at objects in a particular sequence, but the final object disappeared before their eyes moved on to it, it was found that the observers could more accurately recall the location of the object that they were about to look at than the one that they had just been looking at.

[1398] Bays, P. M., & Husain M.
(2008).  Dynamic shifts of limited working memory resources in human vision.
Science (New York, N.Y.). 321(5890), 851 - 854.

http://www.physorg.com/news137337380.html

How Ritalin works to focus attention

Ritalin has been widely used for decades to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but until now the mechanism of how it works hasn’t been well understood. Now a rat study has found that Ritalin, in low doses, fine-tunes the functioning of neurons in the prefrontal cortex, and has little effect elsewhere in the brain. It appears that Ritalin dramatically increases the sensitivity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex to signals coming from the hippocampus. However, in higher doses, PFC neurons stopped responding to incoming information, impairing cognition. Low doses also reinforced coordinated activity of neurons, and weakened activity that wasn't well coordinated. All of this suggests that Ritalin strengthens dominant and important signals within the PFC, while lessening weaker signals that may act as distractors.

[663] Devilbiss, D. M., & Berridge C. W.
(2008).  Cognition-Enhancing Doses of Methylphenidate Preferentially Increase Prefrontal Cortex Neuronal Responsiveness.
Biological Psychiatry. 64(7), 626 - 635.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/uow-suh062408.php

Disentangling attention

A new study provides more evidence that the ability to deliberately focus your attention is physically separate in the brain from the part that helps you filter out distraction. The study trained monkeys to take attention tests on a video screen in return for a treat of apple juice. When the monkeys voluntarily concentrated (‘top-down’ attention), the prefrontal cortex was active, but when something distracting grabbed their attention (‘bottom-up’ attention), the parietal cortex became active. The electrical activity in these two areas vibrated in synchrony as they signaled each other, but top-down attention involved synchrony that was stronger in the lower-frequencies and bottom-up attention involved higher frequencies. These findings may help us develop treatments for attention disorders.

[1071] Buschman, T. J., & Miller E. K.
(2007).  Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Control of Attention in the Prefrontal and Posterior Parietal Cortices.
Science. 315(5820), 1860 - 1862.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/03/29/attention_hea.html?category=health

Asymmetrical brains let fish multitask

A fish study provides support for a theory that lateralized brains allow animals to better handle multiple activities, explaining why vertebrate brains evolved to function asymmetrically. The minnow study found that nonlateralized minnows were as good as those bred to be lateralized (enabling it to favor one or other eye) at catching shrimp. However, when the minnows also had to look out for a sunfish (a minnow predator), the nonlateralized minnows took nearly twice as long to catch 10 shrimp as the lateralized fish.

[737] Dadda, M., & Bisazza A.
(2006).  Does brain asymmetry allow efficient performance of simultaneous tasks?.
Animal Behaviour. 72(3), 523 - 529.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/623/2?etoc

Why are uniforms uniform? Because color helps us track objects

Laboratory tests have revealed that humans can pay attention to only 3 objects at a time. Yet there are instances in the real world — for example, in watching a soccer match — when we certainly think we are paying attention to more than 3 objects. Are we wrong? No. Anew study shows how we do it — it’s all in the color coding. People can focus on more than three items at a time if those items share a common color. But, logically enough, no more than 3 color sets.

[927] Halberda, J., Sires S. F., & Feigenson L.
(2006).  Multiple spatially overlapping sets can be enumerated in parallel.
Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society / APS. 17(7), 572 - 576.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-06/jhu-wau062106.php

An advantage of age

A study comparing the ability of young and older adults to indicate which direction a set of bars moved across a computer screen has found that although younger participants were faster when the bars were small or low in contrast, when the bars were large and high in contrast, the older people were faster. The results suggest that the ability of one neuron to inhibit another is reduced as we age (inhibition helps us find objects within clutter, but makes it hard to see the clutter itself). The loss of inhibition as we age has previously been seen in connection with cognition and speech studies, and is reflected in our greater inability to tune out distraction as we age. Now we see the same process in vision.

[1356] Betts, L. R., Taylor C. P., Sekuler A. B., & Bennett P. J.
(2005).  Aging Reduces Center-Surround Antagonism in Visual Motion Processing.
Neuron. 45(3), 361 - 366.

http://psychology.plebius.org/article.htm?article=739
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-02/mu-opg020305.php

We weren't made to multitask

A new imaging study supports the view that we can’t perform two tasks at once, rather, the tasks must wait their turn — queuing up for their turn at processing.

[1070] Jiang, Y., Saxe R., & Kanwisher N.
(2004).  Functional magnetic resonance imaging provides new constraints on theories of the psychological refractory period.
Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society / APS. 15(6), 390 - 396.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-06/aps-wwm060704.php

More light shed on memory encoding

Anything we perceive contains a huge amount of sensory information. How do we decide what bits to process? New research has identified brain cells that streamline and simplify sensory information, markedly reducing the brain's workload. The study found that when monkeys were taught to remember clip art pictures, their brains reduced the level of detail by sorting the pictures into categories for recall, such as images that contained "people," "buildings," "flowers," and "animals." The categorizing cells were found in the hippocampus. As humans do, different monkeys categorized items in different ways, selecting different aspects of the same stimulus image, most likely reflecting different histories, strategies, and expectations residing within individual hippocampal networks.

[662] Hampson, R. E., Pons T. P., Stanford T. R., & Deadwyler S. A.
(2004).  Categorization in the monkey hippocampus: A possible mechanism for encoding information into memory.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 101(9), 3184 - 3189.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-02/wfub-nfo022604.php

Neural circuits that control eye movements play crucial role in visual attention

Everyone agrees that to improve your memory it is important to “pay attention”. Unfortunately, noone really knows how to improve our ability to “pay attention”. An important step in telling us how visual attention works was recently made in a study that looked at the brain circuits that control eye movements. It appears that those brain circuits that program eye movements also govern whether the myriad signals that pour in from the locations where the eyes could move should be amplified or suppressed. It appears that the very act of preparing to move the eye to a particular location can cause an amplification (or suppression) of signals from that area. This is possible because humans and primates can attend to something without moving their eyes to that object.

[741] Moore, T., & Armstrong K. M.
(2003).  Selective gating of visual signals by microstimulation of frontal cortex.
Nature. 421(6921), 370 - 373.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-01/pu-ssh012303.php

Different aspects of attention located in different parts of the brain

We all know attention is important, but we’ve never been sure exactly what it is. Recent research suggests there’s good reason for this – attention appears to be multi-faceted, far less simple than originally conceived. Patients with specific lesions in the frontal lobes and other parts of the brain have provided evidence that different types of attentional problems are associated with injuries in different parts of the brain, suggesting that attention is not, as has been thought, a global process. The researchers have found evidence for at least three distinct processes, each located in different parts of the frontal lobes. These are: (1) a system that helps us maintain a general state of readiness to respond, in the superior medial frontal regions; (2) a system that sets our threshold for responding to an external stimulus, in the left dorsolateral region; and (3) a system that helps us selectively attend to appropriate stimuli, in the right dorsolateral region.

[260] Stuss, D. T., Binns M. A., Murphy K. J., & Alexander M. P.
(2002).  Dissociations within the anterior attentional system: effects of task complexity and irrelevant information on reaction time speed and accuracy.
Neuropsychology. 16(4), 500 - 513.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-10/apa-pda100702.php

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Memory fitness program improves memory abilities of oldest adults

October, 2011

A six-week memory fitness program offered to older adults helped improve their ability to recognize and recall words.

In a study involving 115 seniors (average age 81), those who participated in a six-week, 12-session memory training program significantly improved their verbal memory. 15-20 seniors participated in each hour-long class, which included explanations of how memory works, quick strategies for remembering names, faces and numbers, basic memory strategies such as linking ideas and creating visual images, and information on a healthy lifestyle for protecting and maintaining memory.

Most of the study participants were women, Caucasian and had attained a college degree or higher level of education.

Reference: 

[2491] Miller, K. J., Siddarth P., Gaines J. M., Parrish J. M., Ercoli L. M., Marx K., et al.
(2011).  The Memory Fitness Program.
American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. 1 - 1.

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