Internet use can “boost” brain function

Science Daily reports:

UCLA scientists… found that middle-aged and older adults with little Internet experience were able to trigger key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning after just one week of surfing the Web.

The findings, presented Oct. 19 at the 2009 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, suggest that Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults.

NEWSWEEK asks: Is your baby racist?

NEWSWEEK reports:

We all want our children to be unintimidated by differences and have the social skills necessary for a diverse world. The question is, do we make it worse, or do we make it better, by calling attention to race?

Is multitasking hazardous to your cognition?

CNN reports:

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

Science Daily reports:

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.

Language and cognition

NEWSWEEK reports:

[Stanford University psychologist] Lera Boroditsky… has long been intrigued by an age-old question whose modern form dates to 1956, when linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf asked whether the language we speak shapes the way we think and see the world. If so, then language is not merely a means of expressing thought, but a constraint on it, too…

…In a series of clever experiments guided by pointed questions, [Boroditsky] is amassing evidence that, yes, language shapes thought. The effect is powerful enough, she says, that “the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically,” not only when they are thinking in order to speak, “but in all manner of cognitive tasks,” including basic sensory perception. “Even a small fluke of grammar”—the gender of nouns—”can have an effect on how people think about things in the world,” she says.

Language even shapes what we see. People have a better memory for colors if different shades have distinct names—not English’s light blue and dark blue, for instance, but Russian’s goluboy and sinly. Skeptics of the language-shapes-thought claim have argued that that’s a trivial finding, showing only that people remember what they saw in both a visual form and a verbal one, but not proving that they actually see the hues differently. In an ingenious experiment, however, Boroditsky and colleagues showed volunteers three color swatches and asked them which of the bottom two was the same as the top one. Native Russian speakers were faster than English speakers when the colors had distinct names, suggesting that having a name for something allows you to perceive it more sharply. Similarly, Korean uses one word for “in” when one object is in another snugly (a letter in an envelope), and a different one when an object is in something loosely (an apple in a bowl). Sure enough, Korean adults are better than English speakers at distinguishing tight fit from loose fit.

Boroditsky’s Web site is here.  If you’d like to learn more about linguistic relativity, this paper (PDF) might be a good starting point.

Reflections on the Implicit Association Test

NEWSWEEK’s Raina Kelley writes:

…I have spent the next 12 years leaving my purse wide open and at least six feet away from me. It’s my penance for having automatically assumed a black man in L.A. was a criminal. Being black doesn’t get me a pass on unconscious negative feelings about African-Americans or the shame we feel when they become conscious. We see the same cultural indicators as everybody else—back then, hours of riot footage, rap videos, and the O.J. trial had created an automatic connection in my mind between African-American Los Angelenos and danger.

So, I was actually excited to read about a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in which researchers from the University of Washington confirmed the validity of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT made a lot of news late last year when results showed that 70 percent of those who took it harbor an unconscious preference for white people over black people. And no, I’m not talking about 70 percent of white people—I mean people of all races who took it, including African-Americans.

The Implicit Association Test can be accessed here.

The influence of ’stereotype threat’ on cognition

TIME Magazine reports:

As explicit discrimination has receded in the last two decades, culminating in the elevation of an African-American to the Presidency, a woman to the House Speakership and a black woman to the galactic dominance known as being Oprah Winfrey, those who study the effects of racism and sexism have had to cope with a difficult question: If discrimination is less powerful, why do some groups in society continue to fare worse than others? Has bias merely become better hidden, or are there other forces at work?

One theory that has gained influence among sociologists is that some members of stigmatized groups, when faced with stressful situations, expect themselves to do worse — a prophecy that fulfills itself. These expectations, which can occur even in otherwise fair (or fair-seeming) situations — such as, say, a standardized test — produce stress and threaten cognitive function. The effect is called “stereotype threat,” and African-Americans, girls, even jocks have all been shown susceptible to stereotype threat.

As explicit discrimination has receded in the last two decades, culminating in the elevation of an African-American to the Presidency, a woman to the House Speakership and a black woman to the galactic dominance known as being Oprah Winfrey, those who study the effects of racism and sexism have had to cope with a difficult question: If discrimination is less powerful, why do some groups in society continue to fare worse than others? Has bias merely become better hidden, or are there other forces at work?

One theory that has gained influence among sociologists is that some members of stigmatized groups, when faced with stressful situations, expect themselves to do worse — a prophecy that fulfills itself. These expectations, which can occur even in otherwise fair (or fair-seeming) situations — such as, say, a standardized test — produce stress and threaten cognitive function. The effect is called “stereotype threat,” and African-Americans, girls, even jocks have all been shown susceptible to stereotype threat.

Are ‘neuro-enhancing’ drugs coming to a campus near you?

NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross reports:

In the modern world of busy schedules and busier lives, some people are turning to “neuro-enhancing” drugs to gain a competitive edge.

As journalist Margaret Talbot writes in the April 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine, a variety of students, professors and business people are taking drugs intended for attention deficit disorder, narcolepsy and epilepsy in an effort to enhance brain function and get ahead.

Talbot’s New Yorker article is available online here.

New study probes relationship between poverty, life stress, and intelligence

USA Today reports:

“Family income is a strong and consistent predictor,” of test scores, school grades and education, say a Cornell University study in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. “The longer the childhood exposure to poverty, the worse the achievement levels become.”

Although a “large, robust literature” stretching back more than a decade describes this observation, study authors Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg note there is no biological explanation for it. Why does poverty have this effect?

To find an answer, the pair looked at 195 men who were part of a long-term study of rural poverty. The study included health records and income. In 2006, about 22% of all children nationwide lived below the poverty line, living on less than $21,200 for a family of four, according to the federal Department of Health and Human Services. (About 18% of people worldwide live below the international poverty line of $1 a day, according to Princeton economist Alan Krueger.)

“The proportion of early childhood spent in poverty is also significantly related to working memory,” finds the study, perhaps not surprising. But when the researchers went back and looked at the men’s health records, the relationship between poverty and memory dissolved, revealing their health — as reflected in blood pressure, obesity and stress hormone measures — are factored in. What looks like an income effect is actually a public health problem.

The Evans & Schamberg report can be accessed here.