During both work hours and leisure time, a growing number of people have become extravagant multitaskers, flitting between Web browsing, texting, emailing, and maybe even throwing in some old-fashioned television or print media for good measure. But a surprising new study has found that those who multitask the most are far worse at it than those people who focus on fewer tasks simultaneously. Says study coauthor Clifford Nass: “The huge finding is, the more media people use the worse they are at using any media. We were totally shocked” [AP].
The researchers compared high- and low-multitaskers on a variety of psychological tests, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They found that the high-multitaskers were worse at ignoring irrelevant information, worse at organizing information, and took more time to switch between tasks. That final finding particularly surprised the researchers, considering the need to switch from one thing to another in multitasking. “They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing,” lead author Eyal Ophir said [AP].
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Chronically stressed rats make decisions based on habit, new research has shown, even when those habits no longer produce the maximum benefit. Researchers say the stressed out rats’ inability to adapt to changing circumstances seems similar to the human response to chronic stress. How often do we talk about burned-out people who are just going through the motions? [ABC News]
In the study, published in Science, the researchers subjected the rats to several tests. In one experiment, the rats were trained to press a lever to receive a reward (either food pellets or sucrose). After two weeks of training, they were given full access to the reward and allowed to consume as much as they desired. When presented with the lever again, control animals stopped pressing the lever, but stressed animals didn’t. If you get the dessert for free, [study coauthor Rui] Costa said, there’s no need to work for it. “That’s what control animals do,” but stressed animals work anyway [The Scientist].
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As much as we humans like to think we can do two things at once, our brains can only process one thing at a time—like the iPhone—but we can get better at switching between the two tasks, according to a study published in Neuron.
Previous studies showed that multitasking activates the brain’s prefrontal cortex, or PFC. This area has been found to be the “bottleneck” that can limit the speed at which we multitask, and it becomes less active as we practice doing two things at once. The prevailing theory for that decreased activity had been that when we practise a task, the brain starts to automatically reroute information from the PFC to regions that are more directly involved [Nature News].
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Cotton-top tamarin monkeys can distinguish between “right” and “wrong” grammatical patterns, according to a study published in the journal Biology Letters. The findings suggest that humans share the ability with other species to identify certain patterns that are crucial to spoken communication.
Researchers wanted to find out if the monkeys, which do not communicate using spoken language, could recognize grammatical sequences. To do this, the scientists familiarized the monkeys with a series of sounds and patterns. They did this by first playing recordings of humans saying two-syllable nonsense words, and familiarized the monkeys with either a prefix or a suffix. “In the prefixation condition, they heard ‘shoy-bi’, ‘shoy-la’, ‘shoy-ro’ and so on,” explained Ansgar Endress, lead author of the study. “The idea is that they get used to the pattern if you play it long enough” [BBC News].
The next day the scientists played new words for the prefix monkeys, but this time included some words in which the prefix had been changed to a suffix, like “na-shoy.” (They did the reverse for the suffix monkeys.) The scientists hypothesized that when the monkeys heard this “incorrect” sequence of sounds, they would be more likely to look at the loudspeakers from which the sounds were coming, the same way a human would. For example, if a person said he or she “walked to the store,” and then [used] the word “edwalk” instead of “walked,” the listener, used to hearing “walked” might stare at the speaker as if to say, “Huh?” [Discovery News].
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It’s the date of your dreams. As the waiter pours the wine, you’re pouring on the charm. Then it happens: You uncork the most embarrassing, oafish and inappropriate thing you’ve ever uttered. And as a look of pure get-me-out-of-here takes hold on your date’s face, you think, “How on Earth could I have said that!” [Toronto Star] Now, Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner suggests that the embarrassing phenomenon of putting your foot in your mouth comes from your brain’s overzealous attempt to avoid social gaffes.
Wegner describes accumulating evidence that suggests many of our embarrassing moments are the result of miscommunications between conscious and unconscious mental processes [LiveScience]. Sitting across the table from your date, you may consciously run through the worst possible things you could say: an insulting remark regarding her ethnicity, perhaps, or an inappropriate sexual allusion. While your conscious mind then moves on to other subjects, the unconscious mind begins a ceaseless scan for those unwelcome thoughts. It’s that monitoring mechanism that can lead to trouble.
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When a person pick up a rake or a croquet mallet or any other tool, their mental image of their body expands subtly, according to a new study. To move our bodies around in space, the brain builds what’s called a “body schema,” a representation of all our various parts. And this so-called schema is frequently updated to keep up with our ever-changing bodies [Scientific American]. This new study, published in Current Biology, found that using a tool for even a brief amount of time caused volunteers to update their body schema, and to consider the tool a part of their bodies.
Lead researcher Alessandro Farnè first asked volunteers to point at and grab wooden blocks with their hands, then had them perform the same motions with a grabber tool, and finally returned to the hands-only gestures. The researchers recorded all of these tasks using a high-resolution three-dimensional motion-tracking system, so that they could compare in detail the movements performed in each task. They found that after using the grabber, the volunteers approached the blocks with slightly lower acceleration and velocity, although their accuracy was not affected. “They behave like their arm is longer,” says Farnè. “They aren’t clumsy, but they are slower and more determined” [Nature News].
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A tiny fish common in European streams may learn in a more sophisticated way than has ever been recorded among animals and which mimics human learning. In a study published in the journal Behavioral Ecology, scientists found that the nine-spined stickleback fish used the success and failures of their peers to gauge where they should seek food.
The fish were shown to display a type of learning known as “hill-climbing,” in which an entity continually looks for a better solution to a problem; in this case, one fish copied others that were more successful in finding food. Researchers caught 270 nine-spined sticklebacks in Leicester, England. The fish were organized into experimental groups. These fish groups then took turns as either free swimmers in a tank with worm-yielding feeders at the end, or as “learners” in a transparent, partitioned-off area of the specially designed tank. One of the two feeders released more worms than the other [Discovery News].
The first group of free-swimming fish quickly learned which feeder was full of worms, and were then put into the observers’ chamber. Next, researchers switched which feeder held the worms, and the fish in the observation tank watched the next fish group identify the new worm-filled feeder. After switching the two groups of fish again, the original group made a beeline for the feeder full of worms that their peers had fed from.
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Parents might know that sitting children in front of the television for hours at a time isn’t the best way to encourage intellectual growth. But a new study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine shows that simply having the TV on in the background can stifle interaction between parent and child, decreasing the number of words spoken and possibly slowing the development of a baby’s language skills.
Scientists have long suspected that TV viewing can damage early development. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends avoiding exposure to television before an infant is two years old, a period when important cognitive changes take place. “We’ve known that television exposure during infancy is associated with language delays and attentional problems, but so far it has remained unclear why,” said lead researcher Dimitri Christakis [LiveScience].
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Researchers have more evidence that takes aim at the old stereotype that boys are better at math than girls. Psychologist Janet Hyde had previously studied scores on standardized math tests in the United States, and found no difference in performance between girls and boys. Her new study expands the scope of the work by analyzing international data. She and her colleague analyzed studies from around the world on math performance along with gender inequality as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index. This index measures the gap between men and women in economic opportunity, educational attainment and other socioeconomic factors [LiveScience].
They found that countries with poor gender equality, like India, had a larger gender gap in math, while in countries with excellent gender equality, like the Netherlands, girls performed as well as boys. If males really did have an innate advantage in math, the researchers note, that advantage should be obvious throughout all these cultures. Instead, the study suggests that cultural issues are the basis of the math gender gap.
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The Saturday Night Live character who famously recited the mantra: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me” may have been setting a valuable example for schoolkids. A new study asked middle school students to do short, self-affirming writing exercises, and found that the simple task boosted the grades of some students for two years afterward. The students who benefited most were blacks who were doing poorly, the study found; the exercises made no difference for white students, or for black ones who were already doing well [The New York Times].
The result is exciting, lead researcher Geoffrey Cohen says, because it suggests that even modest interventions, when done early, can interrupt a downward achievement spiral. “Small changes to an individual’s psychological state can have surprisingly large effect over time if they alter the angle of people’s performance trajectory,” he said, adding that the early benefit is compounded over time [Reuters].
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Sleep may be a way to sweep out the brain and get it ready for a new day of building connections between neurons, according to two new studies of fruit flies. The studies support the controversial theory that sleep weakens or entirely dissolves some synapses, the connections between brain cells. “We assume that if this is happening, it is a major function, if not the most important function, of sleep” [Science News], says Chiara Cirelli, a coauthor of the first study, published in Science.
Pruning synapses may be a practical necessity to keep the brain from being overwhelmed, says Paul Shaw, coauthor of the second study (also published in Science). “There are a number of reasons why the brain can’t indefinitely add synapses – including the finite spatial constraints of the skull. We were able to track the creation of new synapses in fruit flies during learning experiences – and to show that sleep pushed that number back down” [Telegraph], he says.
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When people are given “expert” financial advice, the decision-making parts of the brain shut down, a small new study has found. Brain scans of 24 volunteers showed that claims of expertise were found to suppress activity in the neural circuit linked to decision-making [Telegraph]. “It’s almost as if the brain stops trying to make a decision on its own” [CNN], said lead researcher Gregory Berns.
In the study, college students connected to MRI scanners were asked to choose between taking a guaranteed payment and gambling for a higher payoff. Some made the decision on their own, while others were given written advice that they were told came from an economist who counsels the U.S. Federal Reserve. The advice was intentionally poor, and urged students to accept the guaranteed small payments rather than gamble with good odds for a much higher return. When thinking for themselves, students showed activity in their anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — brain regions associated with making decisions and calculating probabilities. When given advice from [the economist], activity in those regions flat lined [Wired]. The students who received the advice tended to follow it.
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Brain scans can pick up the distinct pattern of brain waves that occur when a person’s attention lapses, and can therefore predict when the person is about to make a mistake, according to a small new study.
Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), researchers monitored the oscillations in brain activity for 14 test subjects. Each student was asked to take part in monotonous test in which a random number from one to nine flashed on a screen every two seconds, and they were asked to tap a button as soon as any number except five appeared. The test was so boring that even when a five showed up, the subjects spontaneously hit the button an average of 40% of the time [BBC News].
About a second before they committed the error, brain waves in two regions spiked: alpha wave activity in the occipital region was about 25 percent greater than usual, and in the sensorimotor cortex there was a corresponding increase in the brain’s mu wave activity.
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To figure out whether you’ll like the restaurant around the corner or that new guy in accounting or a vacation in Madrid, or just about anything else you’ve never personally experienced, try asking a stranger who has [Time]. That stranger is likely to predict, better than you can yourself, how much enjoyment you’ll get from that new experience (or the guy in accounting).
Previous research has shown that people tend to overestimate how disappointed or unhappy they will be after a perceived negative event, such as being denied a promotion, as well as how happy they will feel after positive events, like winning a prize. Building on that knowledge, psychology professor Daniel Gilbert conducted experiments in which he asked people to predict how much they’d enjoy a future event that they knew nothing about—except how much a total stranger had enjoyed it. Those people, it turns out, made extremely accurate predictions [WebMD].
In one experiment, women were asked to partake in “speed dating.” Subjects given reviews by women who had already “dated” participating men were able to gauge how well a date would go better than those who were only shown a picture and profile, and asked to come to their own conclusions.
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A controversial autism treatment has gotten a credibility boost. The first rigorously scientific study of hyperbaric oxygen treatment, in which autistic children breathe in extra oxygen inside a pressurized chamber, found that children who received the treatment showed improvement in social interactions, although researchers note that the small study didn’t examine whether the treatment had long-term effects.
Study leader Dan Rossignol says the use of hyperbaric therapy for autism has been gaining popularity in the US where parents can buy their own hyperbaric chamber if they have a spare $14-17,000 [BBC News]. Other parents take their children to clinics for treatments that usually cost between $120 and $150 per session, and which typically aren’t covered by insurance providers. Rossignol says he expects the findings to generate controversy, and notes that he too was initially very sceptical of the idea but was prompted to do more research after the treatment showed benefits for his two sons who have autism. “We’re certainly not talking about a cure, we’re talking about improvements in behaviour, improving certain functions and quality of life” [BBC News].
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