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While smartphones and other digital assistants have been found to help people with mild memory impairment, their use by those with greater impairment has been less successful.
A small study involving 20 people has found that those who were exposed to 1,8-cineole, one of the main chemical components of rosemary essential oil, performed better on mental arithmetic tasks.
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.
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.
I talked recently about how the well-established difference in spatial ability between men and women apparently has a lot to do with confidence. I also mentioned in passing that previous research has shown that training can close the gender gap.
Openness to experience – being flexible and creative, embracing new ideas and taking on challenging intellectual or cultural pursuits – is one of the ‘Big 5’ personality traits. Unlike the other four, it shows some correlation with cognitive abilities.
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”).
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.
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.
I’ve spoken before about the association between hearing loss in old age and dementia risk.
Articles on Mempowered
- Everyday memory strategies
- Improving attention
- Mnemonics
- Photographic Memory
- Practice counts! So does talent
- Knowing what to do
- Metamemory
- A cognitive failure is generally a strategy failure
- Have we really forgotten how to remember?
- Memory is complicated
- Why asking the right questions is so important, and how to do it
- Successful remembering requires effective self-monitoring
- Why it’s important to work out the specific skills you want to improve
- Variety is the key to learning
- The most effective learning balances same and different context
- What babies can teach us about effective information-seeking and management
- Shaping your cognitive environment for optimal cognition
- Retraining the brain
- Finding the right strategy through perception and physical movement
- Subliminal & sleep learning
- When are two (or more) heads better than one?
- Approaches to learning another language