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16 Dec 09

Conservatism and cognitive ability

Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated. The evidence is based on 1254 community college students and 1600 foreign students seeking entry to United States' universities. At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, Vocabulary, and Analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education (e.g., gross enrollment at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels) and performance on mathematics and reading assessments from the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) project. They also correlate with components of the Failed States Index and several other measures of economic and political development of nations. Conservatism scores have higher correlations with economic and political measures than estimated IQ scores.

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conservatism intelligence cognition research psychology

10 Jul 09

10 Rules That Govern Groups « PsyBlog

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groups psychology collaboration research cognition

2. Initiation rites improve group evaluations

Existing groups don't let others join for free: the cost is sometimes monetary, sometimes intellectual, sometimes physical—but usually there is an initiation rite, even if it's well disguised.

Aronson and Mills (1959) tested the effect of initiation rites by making one group of women read passages from sexually explicit novels. Afterwards they rated the group they had joined much more positively than those who hadn't had to undergo the humiliating initiation. So, not only do groups want to test you, but they want you to value your membership.
Group norms are extremely pervasive: this becomes all the more obvious when we start breaking them.

06 May 09

Findings - Ear Plugs to Lasers - The Science of Concentration - NYTimes.com

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concentration psychology cognition research attention

19 Apr 09

Neuroscience and social deprivation | I am just a poor boy though my story's seldom told | The Economist

How poverty passes from generation to generation is now becoming clearer. The answer lies in the effect of stress on two particular parts of the brain

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poverty brain stress neuroscience psychology cognition sociology learning

THAT the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society.
But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now.
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- The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children.
- Since Dr Farah’s discovery, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University have studied the phenomenon in more detail.
- they have found that the reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop.
- Dr Evans’s and Dr Schamberg’s volunteers were 195 participants in a long-term sociological and medical study that Dr Evans is carrying out in New York state. At the time, the participants were 17 years old. All are white, and the numbers of men and women are about equal.
- To measure the amount of stress an individual had suffered over the course of his life, the two researchers used an index known as allostatic load.
- a combination of the values of six variables: diastolic and systolic blood pressure; the concentrations of three stress-related hormones; and the body-mass index, a measure of obesity.
- For all six, a higher value indicates a more stressful life; and for all six, the values were higher, on average, in poor children than in those who were middle class.
- The capacity of a 17-year-old’s working memory was also correlated with allostatic load. Those who had spent their whole lives in poverty could hold an average of 8.5 items in their memory at any time. Those brought up in a middle-class family could manage 9.4, and those whose economic and social experiences had been mixed were in the middle.
- the diminution of memory in the poorer members of their study was entirely explained by stress, rather than by any more general aspect of poverty.
- To confirm this result, the researchers also looked at characteristics such as each participant’s birthweight, his mother’s age when she gave birth, the mother’s level of education and her marital status, all of which differ, on average, between the poor and the middle classes. None of these characteristics had any effect. Nor did a mother’s own stress levels.
- That stress, and stress alone, is responsible for damaging the working memories of poor children thus looks like a strong hypothesis. It is also backed up by work done on both people and laboratory animals, which shows that stress changes the activity of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that carry signals from one nerve cell to another in the brain. Stress also suppresses the generation of new nerve cells in the brain, and causes the “remodelling” of existing ones. Most significantly of all, it shrinks the volume of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. These are the parts of the brain most closely associated with working memory.

Bringing up baby bilingually | Twice blessed | The Economist

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bilingualism language children learning psychology brain cognition

WHETHER to teach young children a second language is disputed among teachers, researchers and pushy parents. On the one hand, acquiring a new tongue is said to be far easier when young. On the other, teachers complain that children whose parents speak a language at home that is different from the one used in the classroom sometimes struggle in their lessons and are slower to reach linguistic milestones.
A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may help resolve this question by getting to the nub of what is going on in a bilingual child’s brain
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- Agnes Kovacs and Jacques Mehler at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste say that some aspects of the cognitive development of infants raised in a bilingual household must be undergoing acceleration in order to manage which of the two languages they are dealing with.
- The aspect of cognition in question is part of what is termed the brain’s “executive function”.
- So Dr Kovacs and Dr Mehler looked at 40 “preverbal” seven-month-olds, half raised in monolingual and half in bilingual households, and compared their performances in a task that needs control of executive function.
- The bilingual babies, however, found it far easier to switch their attention—counteracting the previously learnt, but no longer useful response.
- Monitoring languages and keeping them separate is part of the brain’s executive function, so these findings suggest that even before a child can speak, a bilingual environment may speed up that function’s development.
- though, there are a few caveats. For one thing, these precocious cognitive benefits have been demonstrated so far only in “crib” bilinguals—those living in households where two languages are spoken routinely. The researchers speculate that it might be the fact of having to learn two languages in the same setting that requires greater use of executive function. So whether those benefits accrue to children who learn one language at home, and one at school, remains unclear.

12 Sep 08

The Effects of the Impact of Instructional Immediacy on Cognition and Learning in Online Classes

Current research has explored the impact of
instructional immediacy, defined as those behaviors that help build
close relationships or feelings of closeness, both on cognition and
motivation in the traditional classroom and online classroom;
however, online courses continue to suffer from higher dropout rates.
Based on Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory, four primary
relationships or interactions in an online course will be explored in
light of how they can provide immediacy thereby reducing student
attrition and improving cognitive learning. The four relationships are
teacher-student, student-student, and student-content, and student-
computer. Results of a study conducted with inservice teachers
completing a 14-week online professional development technology
course will be examined to demonstrate immediacy strategies that
improve cognitive learning and reduce student attrition. Results of
the study reveal that students can be motivated through various
interactions and instructional immediacy behaviors which lead to
higher completion rates, improved self-efficacy, and cognitive
learning.

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cognition pyschology education learning elearning web

30 Aug 08

Uncle Sam Wants Your Brain | Wired Science from Wired.com

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military usa technology ethics human2.0 brain cognition

03 May 08

The Cognitive Age - New York Times

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economics globalization opinion cognition

But as Pankaj Ghemawat of the Harvard Business School has observed, 90 percent of fixed investment around the world is domestic. Companies open plants overseas, but that’s mainly so their production facilities can be close to local markets.
Nor is the globalization paradigm even accurate when applied to manufacturing. Instead of fleeing to Asia, U.S. manufacturing output is up over recent decades. As Thomas Duesterberg of Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, a research firm, has pointed out, the U.S.’s share of global manufacturing output has actually increased slightly since 1980.
3 more annotations...
- William Overholt of the RAND Corporation has noted that between 1994 and 2004 the Chinese shed 25 million manufacturing jobs, 10 times more than the U.S.
- The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.
- The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called “the Chinese” or “the Indians,” are doing this or that. But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning.