I’ve talked before about Dr Berman’s research into Attention Restoration Theory, which proposes that people concentrate better after nature walks or even just looking at nature scenes. In his latest study, the findings have been extended to those with clinical depression.
Is there, or is there not, a gender gap in mathematics performance? And if there is, is it biological or cultural?
Math-anxiety can greatly lower performance on math problems, but just because you suffer from math-anxiety doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to perform badly. A study involving 28 college students has found that some of the students anxious about math performed better than other math-anxious students, and such performance differences were associated with differences in brain activity.
Research has shown that younger adults are better decision makers than older adults — a curious result. A new study tried to capture more ‘real-world’ decision-making, by requiring participants to evaluate each result in order to strategize the next choice.
This time (whew!), the older adults did better.
In the study, 18 children (aged 7-8), 20 adolescents (13-14), and 20 young adults (20-29) were shown pictures and asked to decide whether it was a new picture or one they had seen earlier. Some of the pictures were of known objects and others were fanciful figures (this was in order to measure the effects of novelty in general). After a 10-minute break, they resumed the task — with the twist that any pictures that had appeared in the first session should be judged “new” if that was the first appearance in the second session.
Brain imaging data from 103 healthy people aged 5-32, each of whom was scanned at least twice, has demonstrated that wiring to the frontal lobe continues to develop after adolescence.
One survey of nearly 200 undergraduate college students who were not living with a parent or legal guardian found that 55% reported getting less than seven hours sleep. This is consistent with other surveys. The latest study confirms such a result, but also finds that students tend to think their sleep quality is better than it is (70% of students surveyed described their sleep as "fairly good" or better).
Following animal research indicating that binge drinking damages the hippocampus, and other research showing that this learning and memory center is still developing during adolescence, a new study has investigated the effects of binge drinking on learning in university students. The study, involving 122 Spanish university students (aged 18-20), of whom half engaged in binge drinking, found a clear association between binge drinking and a lower ability to learn new verbal information.
Imaging the brains of 10 young men who were long term users of ecstasy and seven of their healthy peers with no history of ecstasy use has revealed a significantly smaller hippocampus in those who used ecstasy. The overall proportion of gray matter was also lower, suggesting the effects of ecstasy may not be restricted to the hippocampus.
Both groups had used similar amounts of recreational drugs other than ecstasy, and drank alcohol regularly. The ecstasy group had not taken ecstasy for more than two months before the start of the study on average.
A study involving 125 younger (average age 19) and older (average age 69) adults has revealed that while younger adults showed better explicit learning, older adults were better at implicit learning. Implicit memory is our unconscious memory, which influences behavior without our awareness.