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”.
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This is another demonstration of stereotype threat, which is also a nice demonstration of the contextual nature of intelligence. The study involved 70 volunteers (average age 25; range 18-49), who were put in groups of 5. Participants were given a baseline IQ test, on which they were given no feedback. The group then participated in a group IQ test, in which 92 multi-choice questions were presented on a monitor (both individual and group tests were taken from Cattell’s culture fair intelligence test). Each question appeared to each person at the same time, for a pre-determined time.
Following on from research showing an association between lower walking speed and increased risk of dementia, and weaker hand grip strength and increased dementia risk, a large study has explored whether this association extends to middle-aged and younger-old adults.
We know that physical exercise greatly helps you prevent cognitive decline with aging. We know that mental stimulation also helps you prevent age-related cognitive decline. So it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a way of combining the two. A new study found that older adults improved executive function more by participating in virtual reality-enhanced exercise ("exergames") that combine physical exercise with computer-simulated environments and interactive videogame features, compared to the same exercise without the enhancements.
I have reported often on studies pointing to obesity as increasing your risk of developing dementia, and on the smaller evidence that calorie restriction may help fight age-related cognitive decline and dementia (and help you live longer). A new mouse study helps explain why eating less might help the brain.
Students come into classrooms filled with inaccurate knowledge they are confident is correct, and overcoming these misconceptions is notoriously difficult. In recent years, research has shown that such false knowledge can be corrected with feedback. The hypercorrection effect, as it has been termed, expresses the finding that when students are more confident of a wrong answer, they are more likely to remember the right answer if corrected.
This is somewhat against intuition and experience, which would suggest that it is harder to correct more confidently held misconceptions.
I always like gesture studies. I think I’m probably right in saying that they started with language learning. Way back in 1980 it was shown that acting out action phrases meant they were remembered better than if the phrases had been only heard or read (the “enactment effect”). Enacted items, it turned out, “popped out” effortlessly in free recall tests — in other words, enactment had made the phrases highly accessible.
More data from the long-running Mayo Clinic Study of Aging has revealed that, in this one part of the U.S. at least, MCI develops at an overall rate of 6.4% a year among older adults (70+), with a higher rate for men and the less-educated.
The study involved 1,450 older adults (aged 70-89), who underwent memory testing every 15 months for an average of three years. By the end of the study period, 296 people had developed MCI, a rate of 6.4% per year. For men, the rate was 7.2% compared to 5.7% for women.
Quarter of British children performing poorly due to family disadvantage
A British study involving over 18,000 very young children (aged 9 months to 5 years) has found that those exposed to two or more “disadvantages” (28% of the children) were significantly more likely to have impaired intellectual development, expressed in a significantly reduced vocabulary and behavioral problems.
The study involved 74 non-smokers with amnestic MCI (average age 76), of whom half were given a nicotine patch of 15 mg a day for six months and half received a placebo. Cognitive tests were given at the start of the study and again after three and six months.
After 6 months of treatment, the nicotine-treated group showed significant improvement in attention, memory, speed of processing and consistency of processing. For example, the nicotine-treated group regained 46% of normal performance for age on long-term memory, whereas the placebo group worsened by 26%.