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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
Following earlier research suggesting mood affects attention, a new study tries to pin down exactly what it’s affecting.
Research has shown that people are generally poor at predicting how likely they are to remember something.
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 discusse
We’ve all experienced the fading of our ability to concentrate when we’ve been focused on a task for too long. The dominant theory of why this should be so has been around for half a century, and describes attention as a limited resource that gets ‘used up’.
In the first of three experiments, 132 students were found to gesture more often when they had difficulties solving mental rotation problems.
A study involving 171 sedentary, overweight 7- to 11-year-old children has found that those who participated in an exercise program improved both executive function and math achievement.
A link between positive mood and creativity is supported by a study in which 87 students were put into different moods (using music and video clips) and then given a category learning task to do (classifying sets of pictures with visually complex patterns).
In a recent study, volunteers were asked to solve a problem known as the Tower of Hanoi, a game in which you have to move stacked disks from one peg to another.
Brain images of 16 participants in an 8-week mindfulness meditation program, taken two weeks before and after the program, have found measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress.
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