-
A Multitasking Video Game Makes Old Brains Act Younger
The New York Times: There may be a new market for video games: octogenarians. Brain scientists have discovered that swerving around cars while simultaneously picking out road signs in a video game can improve the short-term memory and long-term focus of older adults. Some people as old as 80, the researchers say, begin to show neurological patterns of people in their 20s. ... David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and an expert in attention and aging, said the use of brain measurement tools offered important evidence that something was changing inside the brain.
-
Confidence Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Youbeauty: Chances are, you have seen the low-confidence death spiral up close at some point in your life. You go to a meeting and someone gets up to give a presentation. He clearly doesn’t have command of the material, so he talks softly into his collar using a shaky voice. Someone asks him to speak up and he loses his composure. While people may feel bad for the speaker, compassion won’t change the fact that any chance he had to convey his point is lost. ... The reason that your own level of confidence matters is that people often need help making judgments about quality. The psychologist Dan Ariely performed an interesting experiment.
-
Diagnosing Self-Destruction
NPR Science Friday: Suicide kills twice as many people as murder each year in the United States, and rates in the military recently surpassed those among civilians. But while scientists have identified some risk factors for suicide—being white, being male, substance abuse, mental illness—they still have little idea what spurs people to take their own lives. Listen to the whole story: NPR Science Friday
-
When losing leads to gaining
Chicago Tribune: If you go to a game at U.S. Cellular Field or Wrigley this season, you may wonder why you feel a bit squeezed for space. All those empty seats, and yet, somehow, it feels as though there is less room than there used to be. That guy next to you is crowding a bit into your space. The woman on the other side is spilling over as well. Come to think of it, when did these seats get so darned narrow? Apparently you're not imagining things.
-
Cognitive Science Meets Pre-Algebra
The New York Times: The math students at Liberty Middle School were not happy. The seventh graders’ homework was harder and more time-consuming at first, and many of the problems seemed stale. They were old, from weeks or months ago — proportions, again? — and solving them interrupted the flow of the students’ current work. ... “The result is that you feel you’ve learned the material really well; people prefer blocked practice, when you ask them,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But they do much better on later tests when they practiced interleaved, or mixed, sets of problems or skills. It’s completely counterintuitive.” ...
-
Study finds being poor places heavy burden on mental capacity
The Globe and Mail: Poverty is like a tax on the brain, a team of researchers has reported, because it imposes a measurable burden on the mental capacity of those who must struggle with it day after day. The result, part of a study of cognitive reasoning across income groups, may explain why low-income people seem to have a harder time with certain tasks that require focus or planning and appear to make decisions that work against their best interests. It also suggests that policies and programs designed to help the poor improve their lot may not be successful if they do not take into account how much brain power is used simply in the act of trying to get by with scarce resources. ...
