Children of today are better at delaying gratification than previous generations. By Christian Jarrett If you believed the copious alarmist commentary in the newspapers, you’d fear for the future of our species. Today’s children, we’re told, are more hyperactive and technology addicted than ever before. They’ve lost any ability to sit still, instead craving constant stimulation from digital devices and exhausted parents. What might this mean for their performance on the most famous psychological measure of childhood self-control, Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow Test? Yet based on his analysis of 50 years worth of performance data on the Marshmallow Test – released as a preprint at the Open Science Framework – John Protzko at the University of California, Santa Barbara, concludes that in fact children of today are capable of more self-restraint than previous generations, with their ability to delay gratification having increased by about a minute per decade over the last 50 years.
How could the experts have got it so wrong? Image: From Protzko / OSF, 2017. How US kids’ problems with fractions reveal the fascinating link between language and maths. By guest blogger David Robson Cast your mind back to your teenage maths lessons. Without a calculator, would you have been able to estimate the answer to the following sum? Don’t worry about giving the precise number; just say whether it lies closest to 1, 2, 19, or 21*. By the end of middle school, most American pupils have been studying fractions for a few years; these questions should be embarrassingly easy. But when Robert Siegler, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University posed the problem to a group of 8th graders (13 to 14 year olds), he found that they performed little better than if they’d simply guessed – with just 27 per cent choosing the right answer.
As if this dismal performance wasn’t depressing enough, it comes after decades of educational reforms. Interestingly, students from other cultures – most notably, East Asian countries – do not face these problems. But perhaps the most intriguing explanation involves the language we speak. That may change soon. Related. A classic finding about newborn babies’ imitation skills is probably wrong – Research Digest.
By Christian Jarrett Pick up any introductory psychology textbook and under the “developmental” chapter you’re bound to find a description of “groundbreaking” research into newborn babies’ imitation skills. The work, conducted in the 1970s, will typically be shown alongside black and white images of a man sticking his tongue out at a baby, and the tiny baby duly sticking out her tongue in response. The research was revolutionary because it appeared to show that humans are born with the power to imitate – a skill crucial to learning and relationships – and it contradicted the claims of Jean Piaget, the grandfather of developmental psychology, that imitation does not emerge until babies are around nine months old.
Today it may be time to rewrite these textbooks. A new study in Current Biology, more methodologically rigorous than any previous investigation of its kind, has found no evidence to support the idea that newborn babies can imitate. Related In "Babies" In "Feature" Even a four-year-old can tell when you’re contradicting yourself (and now they won’t trust you) – Research Digest. “Yes Victoria, eating chocolate is unhealthy, but not when I eat it” – you might wonder just how long you can get away this kind of contradictory logic with your kids. If you’d asked Jean Piaget, one of the founding fathers of child psychology, he would probably have told you that you’ll be fine until they’re at least eight. After all, he’d observed that children younger than this age often describe things in contradictory ways, such as saying that a candle sinks because it’s round, but that a ball floats because it’s round.
Recent research has largely backed up Piaget’s view, but in a new study in Child Development, psychologists have shown that children’s recognition of logical inconsistency starts much earlier – around four years of age – when they are exposed to it in a conversational context. This makes sense, say Sabine Doebel and her colleagues, because reasoning probably evolved as a way to evaluate what we’re told by others – an especially important skill for children.
Related. The rise and fall of cognitive skills. Scientists have long known that our ability to think quickly and recall information, also known as fluid intelligence, peaks around age 20 and then begins a slow decline. However, more recent findings, including a new study from neuroscientists at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), suggest that the real picture is much more complex. The study, which appears in the journal Psychological Science, finds that different components of fluid intelligence peak at different ages, some as late as age 40. “At any given age, you’re getting better at some things, you’re getting worse at some other things, and you’re at a plateau at some other things. There’s probably not one age at which you’re peak on most things, much less all of them,” says Joshua Hartshorne, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and one of the paper’s authors.
Measuring peaks Hartshorne and Germine developed a new way to analyze the data that allowed them to compare the age peaks for each task. Proc Nat Inst Sci: Calvin and Hobbes. September 12, 2014 Matt J. Michel1 1 - Editor, PNIS Note: This article has one or more associated corrections. Please click the following links for more details: HTML PDF UPDATE: Our estimates have now been adjusted for inflation.
Introduction According to the U.S. Unfortunately, there seems to be no estimate on the physical damage that the average child causes in one year. Perhaps no other child has caused more damage than Calvin of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Methods The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is a four-volume set containing every published comic strip of Calvin and Hobbes in chronological order. To estimate the cost from damaged goods, I searched amazon.com for comparable items, with some exceptions (e.g., Calvin’s Mom seems somewhat fashionable, so when Calvin placed an incontinent toad on her sweater, I looked for a replacement on jcrew.com).
Figure 1. Footnotes [1] Lino, Mark. (2013) Expenditures on Children by Families, 2012. Human cognition-affecting virus discovered. Researchers at the John Hopkins Medical School and the University of Nebraska have discovered a virus that infects our brains and "makes us more stupid. " In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal, researchers describe coming across the virus by chance, while conducting a different study altogether into throat microbes. Throughout the research, it was found that the DNA in the throats of healthy individuals matched the DNA of a virus (ACTV-1), which usually infects green algae. The algae virus, which was discovered by these researchers, was previously thought to be harmless to humans. However, it has now been found to affect human cognitive capabilities, including our assessment of spatial awareness and visual processing.
When researchers analysed the throats of 92 study participants, they discovered that the ACTV-1 virus was present in 44 percent of them. Readers absorb less on Kindles than on paper, study finds. The whole truth. Children learn a great deal about the world from their own exploration, but they also rely on what adults tell them. Studies have shown that children can figure out when someone is lying to them, but cognitive scientists from MIT recently tackled a subtler question: Can children tell when adults are telling them the truth, but not the whole truth?
Led by Laura Schulz, the Class of 1943 Career Development Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, the researchers found that not only can children make this distinction, but they can also compensate for incomplete information by exploring more on their own. Determining whom to trust is an important skill to learn at an early age because so much of our knowledge about the world comes from other people, says Hyowon Gweon, an MIT postdoc and lead author of a paper describing the findings in the journal Cognition. “When someone provides us information, we not only learn about what is being taught; we also learn something about that person. Cool Kids Lose, Though It May Take A Few Years. Hide captionAs Lindsay Lohan's character (far left) learned in the movie Mean Girls, popularity comes at a price. The Kobal Collection As Lindsay Lohan's character (far left) learned in the movie Mean Girls, popularity comes at a price.
Parents, teachers and cheesy after-school specials have long tried to convince kids that being cool and popular isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Now scientists are chiming in as well. Dating, flouting authority and surrounding yourself with good-looking friends may make you popular when you're 13, according to a study published online Wednesday. But don't believe the media hype, psychologists say. Hide captionJames Dean was way too cool for school in Rebel Without a Cause. James Dean was way too cool for school in Rebel Without a Cause.
"We call it the high school reunion effect," says Joseph Allen, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and the study's lead author. Of course, this doesn't mean that any kid's fate is set at 13, Allen says. The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids. What do we make of a boy like Thomas?
Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that he’s smart. But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges?
Thomas is not alone. Introducing the SuperAgers - the elderly people whose brains have stayed young. They say the slow inevitable decline sets in during our early twenties. Like a rocket reaching its apogee, once the brain is fully developed there is the briefest lull, and then it's all downhill, the last neural areas to develop being the first to start unravelling. By the time of old age, so certain are the impairments in mental processing that psychological tests are age-adjusted - "You're slow Bob, but not for your age. For an 80-year-old you're doing just fine.
" But wait. A team led by Theresa Harrison at the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern University say they've identified a group of elderly individuals whose brains appear relatively immune to the physical effects of ageing. Harrison and her colleagues identified these 12 "SuperAgers" (average age 84) by their exceptional mental performance. Using a structural brain scanner, the researchers found that the SuperAgers had brains that seemed to have resisted the erosive influence of time. Theresa M. The Truth About the Effect of Pregnancy on Women's Brains.
“When I was pregnant,” Guardian columnist and feminist Zoe Williams recalled in 2010 , “I managed to lose the dog's lead, between the common and the house. So I took my jumper off and tied him to that, only I forgot that I wasn't wearing a proper top underneath – I was wearing something in the region of a string vest. How could I not notice? Why was I even wearing a string vest?”. Williams believes she was suffering from a kind of mental impairment brought on by the biological changes associated with pregnancy – an idea that’s been called variously preghead, pregnesia, momnesia and baby brain . Surveys suggest that belief in pregnesia is widespread among the public. The reality The myth of pregnesia hasn’t come out of thin air. But whilst subjective reports of this from pregnant women are widespread, objective laboratory studies are far less consistent.
Unfortunately, Henry and Rendell’s abstract of their paper was worded in a way that proved ripe for misinterpretation. Be careful when comforting struggling students. Previous research tells us that students who see intelligence and ability as fixed will tend to give up when confronted by a difficult problem, whereas those who see intelligence as growable will persevere. But how do teachers' beliefs about ability affect the way they perceive and respond to their students' performance? A new investigation led by Aneeta Rattan, together with Carol Dweck, the doyenne of this area, and Catherine Good, began by asking 41 undergrads about their beliefs regarding maths ability (e.g. did they agree that "You have a certain amount of math intelligence and you can't really do much to change it"?).
Asked to imagine they were a maths teacher responding to a student's initial poor maths exam result, those undergrads who endorsed this fixed "entity" theory of maths ability tended to jump to conclusions - assuming that their student had struggled because he or she lacked maths ability. Rattan, A., Good, C., and Dweck, C. (2012). If We Feel Too Busy, It's Probably Due to Too Much Free Time: Scientific American Podcast. Objectively time is constant. A minute is a minute. But when we have a lot to do, it usually feels like we have less time. Now a study finds an interesting wrinkle in time: when we busy ourselves with selfless tasks, time seems to expand. The work will be published the journal Psychological Science. Researchers interrupted more than 200 students in class and asked them to complete different five-minute tasks.
Some had to cross out the letter “e” in pages of text. In another experiment one group of subjects were given a period of free time to do whatever they wanted, while another group had to do something for someone else. Many Americans have more leisure time today than ever before. —Christie Nicholson [The above text is a transcript of this podcast.] Guitar Zero: A Neuroscientist Debunks the Myth of "Music Instinct" By Maria Popova On nature, nurture, and the neural pathways of possibility. Are musicians born or made? What is the line between skill and talent in any domain, and can we acquire either later in life?
That’s exactly what neuroscientist Gary Marcus explores in Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning — a fascinating journey into the limits of human reinvention. In an effort to reconcile his lifelong passion for music with his self-admitted chronic musical inaptitude, Marcus set out to debunk one of science’s longest-running theories about learning — that there are “critical periods” in which complex skills can be learned, and that they slam shut after adolescence. If critical periods aren’t quite so firm as people once believed, a world of possibility emerges for the many adults who harbor secret dreams — whether to learn a language, to become a pastry chef, or to pilot a small plane. Could persistence and a lifelong love of music overcome age and a lack of talent? Genes for Intelligence - Back to Square One. Hearing about scientists' struggles helps inspire students and boosts their learning.
Out-of-body experience: Master of illusion. What Does Your Web Browser Say About Your I.Q.? (Hint: I.E. Users Won’t Like the Answer) The first ever experimental investigation of laughing at oneself. When four is not four, but rather two plus two. NERS Review of the year Part 5 – Best mind hacks | Not Exactly Rocket Science. Body Under General Anesthesia Tracks Closer to Coma than Sleep. How long is a severed head conscious for? Why Do People Confess to Crimes They Didn’t Commit?
The Way We Live Now - Living to Be a Parent. The Memory Doctor. - By William Saletan. Blog Archive » …A Toast to the Host with the Least Cognitive Decline! Neuroscience Cases: The Man Who Could Not Forget « B Good Science Blog. Children in formal child care have better language skills. Tool Use and Extended Mind - The Post-Cognitivist Blog.