Brain system behind general intelligence identified

Back in 2009, I reported briefly on a large Norwegian study that found that older adults who consumed chocolate, wine, and tea performed significantly better on cognitive tests. The association was assumed to be linked to the flavanols in these products. A new study confirms this finding, and extends it to older adults with mild cognitive impairment.

I’ve reported before on the evidence suggesting that carriers of the ‘Alzheimer’s gene’, APOE4, tend to have smaller brain volumes and perform worse on cognitive tests, despite being cognitively ‘normal’. However, the research hasn’t been consistent, and now a new study suggests the reason.

A British study looking at possible gender differences in the effects of math anxiety involved 433 secondary school children (11-16 years old) completing customized (year appropriate) mental mathematics tests as well as questionnaires designed to assess math anxiety and (separately) test anxiety. These sources of anxiety are often confounded in research studies (and in real life!), and while they are indeed related, reported correlations are moderate, ranging from .30 to .50.

I have said before that there is little evidence that working memory training has any wider benefits than to the skills being practiced. Occasionally a study arises that gets everyone all excited, but by and large training only benefits the skill being practiced — despite the fact that working memory underlies so many cognitive tasks, and limited working memory capacity is thought to negatively affect performance on so many tasks.

A study involving 75 perimenopausal women aged 40 to 60 has found that those with memory complaints tended to show impairments in working memory and attention. Complaints were not, however, associated with verbal learning or memory.

Complaints were also associated with depression, anxiety, somatic complaints, and sleep disturbance. But they weren’t linked to hormone levels (although estrogen is an important hormone for learning and memory).

A new study explains how marijuana impairs working memory. The component THC removes AMPA receptors for the neurotransmitter glutamate in the hippocampus. This means that there are fewer receivers for the information crossing between neurons.

The research is also significant because it adds to the growing evidence for the role of astrocytes in neural transmission of information.

We’re all familiar with the experience of going to another room and forgetting why we’ve done so. The problem has been largely attributed to a failure of attention, but recent research suggests something rather more specific is going on.

Back in 2008, I reported on a small study that found that daily doses of Pycnogenol® for three months improved working memory in older adults, and noted research indicating that the extract from the bark of the French maritime pine tree had reduced symptoms in children with ADHD. Now another study, involving 53 Italian university students, has found that cognitive performance improved in those taking 100 mg of Pycnogenol every day for eight weeks.

One of the few established cognitive differences between men and women lies in spatial ability. But in recent years, this ‘fact’ has been shaken by evidence that training can close the gap between the genders. In this new study, 545 students were given a standard 3D mental rotation task, while at the same time manipulating their confidence levels.

In the first experiment, 70 students were asked to rate their confidence in each answer. They could also choose not to answer. Confidence level was significantly correlated with performance both between and within genders.

A review of 10 observational and four intervention studies as said to provide strong evidence for a positive relationship between physical activity and academic performance in young people (6-18). While only three of the four intervention studies and three of the 10 observational studies found a positive correlation, that included the two studies (one intervention and one observational) that researchers described as “high-quality”.