About memory

We learn from what we read and what people tell us, and we learn from our own experience. Although you would think that personal experience would easily trump other people’s advice, we in fact tend to favor abstract information against our own experience.

Adding to the growing evidence that social activity helps prevent age-related cognitive decline, a longitudinal study involving 1,138 older adults (mean age 80) has found that those who had the highest levels of social activity (top 10%) experienced only a quarter of the rate of cognitive declin

The study involved 26 experienced Buddhist meditators and 40 control subjects.

As I’ve discussed on many occasions, a critical part of attention (and

A study involved 117 older adults (mean age 78) found those at greater risk of coronary artery disease had substantially greater risk for decline in verbal fluency and the ability to ignore irrelevant information. Verbal memory was not affected.

A study of 265 New York City minority children has found that those born with higher amounts of the insecticide chlorpyrifos had lower IQ scores at age 7.

A study involving 200 older adults (70+) experiencing a stay in hospital has found that at discharge nearly a third (31.5%) had previously unrecognized low cognitive function (scoring below 25 on the MMSE if high-school-educated, or below 18 if not).

A study involving 1426 long-term survivors of childhood cancer (survivors of eight different childhood cancers who were treated between 1970 and 1986) has revealed cognitive impairment in over a fifth.

From the Whitehall II study, data involving 5431 older participants (45-69 at baseline) has revealed a significant effect of midlife sleep changes on later cognitive function. Sleep duration was assessed at one point between 1997 and 1999, and again between 2002 and 2004.

A training program designed to help older adults with

A review of 23 longitudinal studies of older adults (65+) has found that small amounts of alcohol were associated with lower incidence rates of overall dementia and Alzheimer dementia, but not of

A study involving 614 middle-aged vineyard workers has found that those who were exposed to pesticides were five times as likely to perform more poorly on cognitive tests compared to those not exposed, and twice as likely to show cognitive decline over a two-year period.

The mental differences between a novice and an expert are only beginning to be understood, but two factors thought to be of importance are automaticity (the process by which a procedure becomes so practiced that it no longer requires conscious thought) and chunking (the unitizing of related bits

What makes one person so much better than another in picking up a new motor skill, like playing the piano or driving or typing?

Following previous research suggesting that the volume of the

A study involving 50 people with MS (aged 18-65), of whom half used marijuana for pain relief, has found that marijuana users performed significantly worse on tests of attention, speed of thinking, executive function and visual perception of spatial relationships between objects.

It’s well-established that feelings of encoding fluency are positively correlated with judgments of learning, so it’s been generally believed that people primarily use the simple rule, easily learned = easily remembered (ELER), to work out whether they’re likely to remember something (as discuss

Research has shown that people are generally poor at predicting how likely they are to remember something.