A rat study has found that infant males have more of the Foxp2 protein (associated with language development) than females and that males also made significantly more distress calls than females. Increasing the protein level in females and reducing it in males reversed the gender differences in alarm calls.
A small pilot study with humans found that 4-year-old girls had more of the protein than boys. In both cases, it is the more communicative gender that has the higher level of Foxp2.
More evidence for the importance of glia, previously regarded as mere ‘support cells’ in the brain, comes from a mouse study — which also indicates the role of astrocytes in the evolution of the human brain. The study found that mice that received transplants of human glial progenitor cells learned much more quickly than normal mice.
"The general consensus is that math anxiety doesn't affect children much before fourth grade.” New research contests that.
Study 1: found many first grade students do experience negative feelings and worry related to math. This math anxiety negatively affects their math performance when it comes to solving math problems in standard arithmetic notation.
Study 2: found that second grade math anxiety affected second grade computations and math applications. Additionally, children with higher levels of math anxiety in second grade learned less math in third grade.
I’ve reported often on the perils of multitasking. Here is yet another one, with an intriguing new finding: it seems that the people who multitask the most are those least capable of doing so!
The study surveyed 310 undergraduate psychology students to find their actual multitasking ability, perceived multitasking ability, cell phone use while driving, use of a wide array of electronic media, and personality traits such as impulsivity and sensation-seeking.
Preliminary findings from a small study show that older adults (68-91), after learning to use Facebook, performed about 25% better on tasks designed to measure their ability to continuously monitor and to quickly add or delete the contents of their working memory (updating), compared to their baseline performance. Two other groups of 14 showed no change. The second group of 14 were taught to use a private online diary site (Penzu.com), while the third control group were told they were on a wait-list for Facebook training.
A 2-year trial involving 251 patients with Parkinson's disease and early motor complications (mean age, 52 years; mean duration of disease, 7.5 years) has found that those given deep brain stimulation surgery significantly improved their quality of life, motor disability, activities of daily living, levodopa-induced motor complications, and time with good mobility and no dyskinesia. Those given normal medical therapy, on the other hand, declined or at best got no worse.
A study involving 180 13-year-olds who had been assessed every year since kindergarten has found that their understanding of the number system in first grade predicted functional numeracy more than six years later, but skill at using counting procedures to solve arithmetic problems did not. Researchers controlled for intelligence, working memory, in-class attentive behavior, mathematical achievement, demographic and other factors.
It certainly sounds like pseudo-science, but that's why we do science - because the weirdness of something is not a particularly good reason to dismiss it (quantum! many-universes!). Sometimes we don't understand enough about how things work to know why they work, but finding out whether or not they work is a good place to start.
Tori Rodriguez at Scientific American:
Data from the very large, long-running UK National Child Development Study has revealed that those who exercised at least four times weekly as both a child and an adult performed better on cognitive tests at age 50 than those who exercised two to three times per month or less, and the latter in turn performed better than those who hadn’t regularly exercised at all.
In the first study to analyze parent praise in a real-world setting, it’s been found that the kind of praise parents give their babies and toddlers influences the child’s motivation later on, and plays a role in children’s beliefs about themselves and their desire to take on challenges five years later.