Archive for August 2009
Is multitasking hazardous to your cognition?
A new study suggests that people who often do multiple tasks in a variety of media — texting, instant messaging, online video watching, word processing, Web surfing, and more — do worse on tests in which they need to switch attention from one task to another than people who rarely multitask in this way.
Specifically, heavy multitaskers are more easily distracted by irrelevant information than those who aren’t constantly in a multimedia frenzy, according to the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
One reason may be because the multitaskers tend to retain the distracting information in their short-term memory, which affects their ability to focus, compared with people who don’t check their e-mail while talking on the phone and sneaking in some online shopping.
The article is available here (subscription required).
The “new science of learning”
The journal Science has published a paper on a developing “new science of learning.” The article’s abstract states:
Human learning is distinguished by the range and complexity of skills that can be learned and the degree of abstraction that can be achieved compared with those of other species. Homo sapiens is also the only species that has developed formal ways to enhance learning: teachers, schools, and curricula. Human infants have an intense interest in people and their behavior and possess powerful implicit learning mechanisms that are affected by social interaction. Neuroscientists are beginning to understand the brain mechanisms underlying learning and how shared brain systems for perception and action support social learning. Machine learning algorithms are being developed that allow robots and computers to learn autonomously. New insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices.
The article is available here (subscription required). Science Daily has a summary of the article here.
Note: this is cross-posted with my Education Blog.
New study suggests we learn more from successes than from failures
If you’ve ever felt doomed to repeat your mistakes, researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory may have explained why: Brain cells may only learn from experience when we do something right and not when we fail.
In the July 30 issue of the journal Neuron, Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience, and MIT colleagues Mark Histed and Anitha Pasupathy have created for the first time a unique snapshot of the learning process that shows how single cells change their responses in real time as a result of information about what is the right action and what is the wrong one.
“We have shown that brain cells keep track of whether recent behaviors were successful or not,” Miller said. Furthermore, when a behavior was successful, cells became more finely tuned to what the animal was learning. After a failure, there was little or no change in the brain — nor was there any improvement in behavior.
TIME Magazine: “Self-help through negative thinking”
TIME Magazine reports on new research into the so-called ’self-help’ phenomenon (termed cognitive restructuring by mental health experts).
A study just published in the journal Psychological Science says trying to get people to think more positively can actually have the opposite effect: it can simply highlight how unhappy they are.
