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To Stay Sharp as You Age, Learn New Skills
In most adults, learning and thinking plateau and then begin to decline after age 30 or 40. People start to perform worse in tests of cognitive abilities such as processing speed, the rate at which someone does a mental task. The slide becomes steeper after 60 years of age. These changes are often ascribed to normal aging. But what if instead they represent something more like the “summer slide” that schoolchildren experience? Every year teachers and parents observe how summer vacations lead some children’s academic progress to backslide.
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Repeated Exposure to News Headlines Makes Behavior Seem Less Unethical
From frequent smartphone notifications to repetitious TV news programs, we often experience repeated exposure to various news headlines as we go about our daily lives. When the news provides stories of wrongdoing, that repeated exposure may influence our own sense of morality, making those narratives seem more true and less unethical.
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Trouble Achieving Goals? Why Your Brain Needs Reminders.
Many of us set goals, but sometimes we fail to achieve them. There is a way, though, to increase our chances of hitting our goals: Set reminders. “It’s quite hard to achieve our goals,” said Sam Gilbert, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University College London. “There are many, many reasons why we get led astray, or we don’t manage to realize our goals.” One common, but addressable reason is that we simply forget them. Psychological studies suggest that 50 to 70 percent of our everyday memory failures involve forgetting our intentions. Creating reminders can help address this problem. Research explains why.
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For Whom the School Bells Toll: New Psychological Research for the New Academic Year
A collection of research published in the APS journals in 2022 and 2023 related to peer relationships, pandemic-related learning losses, the positive impacts of growth mindsets, and much more.
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When a Brain Injury Impairs Memory, a Pulse of Electricity May Help
If you've ever had trouble finding your keys or remembering what you had for breakfast, you know that short-term memory is far from perfect. For people who've had a traumatic brain injury (TBI), though, recalling recent events or conversations can be a major struggle. "We have patients whose family cannot leave them alone at home because they will turn on the stove and forget to turn it off," says Dr. Ramon Diaz-Arrastia, who directs the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinical Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania. So Arrastia and a team of scientists have been testing a potential treatment. It involves delivering a pulse of electricity to the brain at just the right time. ...
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How Bad Is Screen Time for Kids, Really?
Screen time has been a hot-button topic for parents for decades and particularly over the past few years. The rise of personal devices like tablets, phones and smart watches, along with the use of screens in schools, has made screen time common for kids. Data also shows that screen time skyrocketed during the pandemic as parents struggled to juggle working with managing their children being at home. Screen time guidelines have changed slightly over time. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) used to recommend no screen time at all for children until 18 to 24 months, and limiting kids ages 2 to 5 to an hour or less of screen time a day. ...
