Human intelligence cannot be explained by the size of the brain’s frontal lobes, say researchers.
Research into the comparative size of the frontal lobes in humans and other species has determined that they are not - as previously thought - disproportionately enlarged relative to other areas…
(Source: eurekalert.org)
Cannabis is easily the most widely used illegal substance in the world. Although it still illegal at federal level, Washington and Colorado have legalized recreational cannabis use. Studies examining the relationship between marijuana use and neuropsychological function should be taken into…
How Multitasking Can Improve Judgments
Research has revealed that multitasking impedes performance across a variety of tasks. Emergency room nurses that are interrupted multiple times while treating a patient can be more likely to make medication errors. Driving while speaking on a mobile phone significantly increases the probability of an automobile accident. At the same time, however, experienced golfers putt better when distracted than experienced golfers who are focusing on performance. Distractions resulting from the presence of other people can increase an individual’s performance, too. Why?
Addressing the Contradictions
In a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, one of the world’s top-ranked empirical journals in psychology, a team of researchers from the University of Basel helps to clarify these apparent contradictions. Lead author Janina Hoffmann, a Ph.D. student in Economic Psychology, and her co-authors Dr. Bettina von Helversen and Prof. Dr. Jörg Rieskamp, find that the type of judgment strategy that an individual employs strongly conditions how the “cognitive load” induced by multitasking affects performance. Higher cognitive load can actually improve performance when the task can be best completed using a less demanding, similarity-based strategy that informs judgments by retrieving past instances from memory.The study is supported by the findings of two experiments conducted at the University of Basel. The first study exposed 90 participants to variable cognitive loads as they were asked to solve a judgment task whose solution was best achieved through the use of a similarity-based strategy (predicting how many cartoon characters another cartoon character could catch). Most participants switched to using a similarity-based strategy and produced more accurate judgments. The second study then exposed 60 participants to a linear task whose solution was not conducive to similarity-based strategies but rather rule- based strategies. Those participants who employed a similarity-based strategy made poorer judgments. The experiments were conducted with financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Moving Forward
Cognitive load does not per se lead to worse performance, but rather it can, dependent on strategy choice, lead to better performance. The researchers believe that it is important to decipher cognitive strategies that people choose under given levels of cognitive load. Hoffmann claims, “A better understanding of these cognitive strategies may permit future studies to predict the precise circumstances under which people can solve a problem particularly well.”
Grammar errors? The brain detects them even when you are unaware
Your brain often works on autopilot when it comes to grammar. That theory has been around for years, but University of Oregon neuroscientists have captured elusive hard evidence that people indeed detect and process grammatical errors with no awareness of doing so.
Participants in the study — native-English speaking people, ages 18-30 — had their brain activity recorded using electroencephalography, from which researchers focused on a signal known as the Event-Related Potential (ERP). This non-invasive technique allows for the capture of changes in brain electrical activity during an event. In this case, events were short sentences presented visually one word at a time.
Subjects were given 280 experimental sentences, including some that were syntactically (grammatically) correct and others containing grammatical errors, such as “We drank Lisa’s brandy by the fire in the lobby,” or “We drank Lisa’s by brandy the fire in the lobby.” A 50 millisecond audio tone was also played at some point in each sentence. A tone appeared before or after a grammatical faux pas was presented. The auditory distraction also appeared in grammatically correct sentences.
This approach, said lead author Laura Batterink, a postdoctoral researcher, provided a signature of whether awareness was at work during processing of the errors. “Participants had to respond to the tone as quickly as they could, indicating if its pitch was low, medium or high,” she said. “The grammatical violations were fully visible to participants, but because they had to complete this extra task, they were often not consciously aware of the violations. They would read the sentence and have to indicate if it was correct or incorrect. If the tone was played immediately before the grammatical violation, they were more likely to say the sentence was correct even it wasn’t.”
When tones appeared after grammatical errors, subjects detected 89 percent of the errors. In cases where subjects correctly declared errors in sentences, the researchers found a P600 effect, an ERP response in which the error is recognized and corrected on the fly to make sense of the sentence.
When the tones appear before the grammatical errors, subjects detected only 51 percent of them. The tone before the event, said co-author Helen J. Neville, who holds the UO’s Robert and Beverly Lewis Endowed Chair in psychology, created a blink in their attention. The key to conscious awareness, she said, is based on whether or not a person can declare an error, and the tones disrupted participants’ ability to declare the errors. But, even when the participants did not notice these errors, their brains responded to them, generating an early negative ERP response. These undetected errors also delayed participants’ reaction times to the tones.
“Even when you don’t pick up on a syntactic error your brain is still picking up on it,” Batterink said. “There is a brain mechanism recognizing it and reacting to it, processing it unconsciously so you understand it properly.”
The study was published in the May 8 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
The brain processes syntactic information implicitly, in the absence of awareness, the authors concluded. “While other aspects of language, such as semantics and phonology, can also be processed implicitly, the present data represent the first direct evidence that implicit mechanisms also play a role in the processing of syntax, the core computational component of language.”
It may be time to reconsider some teaching strategies, especially how adults are taught a second language, said Neville, a member of the UO’s Institute of Neuroscience and director of the UO’s Brain Development Lab.
Children, she noted, often pick up grammar rules implicitly through routine daily interactions with parents or peers, simply hearing and processing new words and their usage before any formal instruction. She likened such learning to “Jabberwocky,” the nonsense poem introduced by writer Lewis Carroll in 1871 in “Through the Looking Glass,” where Alice discovers a book in an unrecognizable language that turns out to be written inversely and readable in a mirror.
For a second language, she said, “Teach grammatical rules implicitly, without any semantics at all, like with jabberwocky. Get them to listen to jabberwocky, like a child does.”
“I think that we got so caught up in school being a tradition that we stopped using it as a learning tool, which it should be.” -Tupac Shakur at Age 17
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To suppress or to explore? Emotional strategy may influence anxiety
When trouble approaches, what do you do? Run for the hills? Hide? Pretend it isn’t there? Or do you focus on the promise of rain in those looming dark clouds?
New research suggests that the way you regulate your emotions, in bad times and in good, can influence whether – or how much – you suffer from anxiety.
The study appears in the journal Emotion.
In a series of questionnaires, researchers asked 179 healthy men and women how they managed their emotions and how anxious they felt in various situations. The team analyzed the results to see if different emotional strategies were associated with more or less anxiety.
The study revealed that those who engage in an emotional regulation strategy called reappraisal tended to also have less social anxiety and less anxiety in general than those who avoid expressing their feelings. Reappraisal involves looking at a problem in a new way, said University of Illinois graduate student Nicole Llewellyn, who led the research with psychology professor Florin Dolcos, an affiliate of the Beckman Institute at Illinois.
“When something happens, you think about it in a more positive light, a glass half full instead of half empty,” Llewellyn said. “You sort of reframe and reappraise what’s happened and think what are the positives about this? What are the ways I can look at this and think of it as a stimulating challenge rather than a problem?”
Study participants who regularly used this approach reported less severe anxiety than those who tended to suppress their emotions.
Anxiety disorders are a major public health problem in the U.S. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, roughly 18 percent of the U.S. adult population is afflicted with general or social anxiety that is so intense that it warrants a diagnosis.
“The World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, anxiety and depression –which tend to co-occur – will be among the most prevalent causes of disability worldwide, secondary only to cardiovascular disease,” Dolcos said. “So it’s associated with big costs.”
Not all anxiety is bad, however, he said. Low-level anxiety may help you maintain the kind of focus that gets things done. Suppressing or putting a lid on your emotions also can be a good strategy in a short-term situation, such as when your boss yells at you, Dolcos said. Similarly, an always-positive attitude can be dangerous, causing a person to ignore health problems, for example, or to engage in risky behavior.
Previous studies had found that people who were temperamentally inclined to focus on making good things happen were less likely to suffer from anxiety than those who focused on preventing bad things from happening, Llewellyn said. But she could find no earlier research that explained how this difference in focus translated to behaviors that people could change. The new study appears to explain the strategies that contribute to a person having more or less anxiety, she said.
“This is something you can change,” she said. “You can’t do much to affect the genetic or environmental factors that contribute to anxiety. But you can change your emotion regulation strategies.”
Brain Frontal Lobes Not Sole Center of Human Intelligence, Comparative Research Suggests
May 13, 2013 — Human intelligence cannot be explained by the size of the brain’s frontal lobes, say researchers.
Research into the comparative size of the frontal lobes in humans and other species has determined that they are not — as previously thought — disproportionately enlarged relative to other areas of the brain, according to the most accurate and conclusive study of this area of the brain.
(via wildcat2030)
“I’m 10 and pregnant.” “I’m 17 and a virgin.” “I’m 85 and tired.”
Google auto-complete reveals our deepest fears. Watch.
Imagine A Flying Pig: How Words Take Shape In The Brain
This is a story about a duck. More precisely, it’s a story about what your brain just did when you read the word “duck.”
Chances are, your brain created an image of a web-footed waterfowl. It also may have recalled the sound of quacking or the feel of feathers. And new research suggests that these mental simulations are essential to understanding language.
Just a few decades ago, many linguists thought the human brain had evolved a special module for language. It seemed plausible that our brains have some unique structure or system. After all, no animal can use language the way people can.
But in the 1990s, scientists began testing the language-module theory using “functional” MRI technology that let them watch the brain respond to words. And what they saw didn’t look like a module, says Benjamin Bergen, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and author of the book Louder Than Words.“They found something totally surprising,” Bergen says. “It’s not just certain specific little regions in the brain, regions dedicated to language, that were lighting up. It was kind of a whole-brain type of process.”
If someone read a sentence like, “the shortstop threw the ball to first base,” parts of the brain dedicated to vision and movement would light up, Bergen says. “The question was, why?” he says. “They’re just listening to language. Why would they be preparing to act? Why would they be thinking that they were seeing something?”
The answer that emerged from this research is that when you encounter words describing a particular action, your brain simulates the experience, Bergen says.
“The way that you understand an action is by recreating in your vision system what it would look like to perceive that event and recreating in your motor system what it would be like to be that shortstop, to have the ball in your hand and release it,” Bergen says.
The brain appears to be taking words, which are just arbitrary symbols, and translating them into things we can see or hear or do, Bergen says.
That’s not much of a stretch when it comes to words for things like throwing a baseball or seeing a duck. But what about words for things we’ve probably never seen? Like a flying pig.
“A flying pig isn’t something that actually exists in the real world,” Bergen says. Yet when we read those words we see one in our mind’s eye. Most people see a pig with wings above its shoulders, Bergen says. But some people imagine a pig with a cape, flying like Superman.
A flying pig has meaning to us because our brain is using things we have seen — pigs and birds — to create something we’ve never seen. And Bergen says we also draw on personal experience when we use language to convey abstract ideas — like truth, or justice, or even the word “meaning.”
“What we actually say when we talk about meaning is, do you see what I mean? Is my point crystal clear? Maybe, let’s shed a little light on the subject,” Bergen says. What we’re doing, he says, is extending our physical experiences — in this case things we’ve seen — by turning them into metaphors.
We use this sort of metaphor all the time in conversation, Bergen says. We “grasp” the truth. We “dodge” questions. We “fall” in love.
Philosophers have been debating the importance of metaphors like these since the time of Aristotle. But now, brain researchers like Krish Sathian at Emory University are getting involved.
Sathian has been studying an area of the brain that responds to the texture of an object — whether it feels smooth or rough. And he wondered whether the same area would respond when we use textures like smooth or rough as metaphors.
So he had people lie in an fMRI scanner while they listened to metaphors like, “he had a rough day,” as well as similar sentences with no metaphor like, “he had a bad day.”
The results suggest that, at least to the brain, a rough day has something in common with a sheet of sandpaper, Sathian says. “When listening to these sentences containing textural metaphors, we found activity in the part of the brain that’s involved when we feel surfaces,” he says
Research like this adds to the evidence that the human brain is not processing language in some special module, Sathian says. “The brain is really working as a very highly distributed system.”
What’s amazing is that people have been able to do so much with language using the same basic brain structures found in monkeys and apes, Bergen says.
“What evolution has done is to build a new machine, a capacity for language, something that nothing else in the known universe can do,” he says. “And it’s done so using the spare parts that it had lying around in the old primate brain.”
Image: Although a flying pig doesn’t exist in the real world, our brains use what we know about pigs and birds — and superheroes — to create one in our mind’s eye when we hear or read those words.
(via wildcat2030)
A new study from investigators at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind/Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center finds that eliciting the relaxation response—a physiologic state of deep rest induced by practices such as meditation, yoga, deep breathing…
(Source: hms.harvard.edu)
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