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Do you remember more if the memory is personally relevant?
Examiner: A psychology researcher at North Carolina State University is proposing a new theory to explain why older adults show declining cognitive ability with age, but don’t necessarily show declines in the workplace or daily life. One key appears to be how motivated older adults are to maintain focus on cognitive tasks. The paper, “Selective Engagement of Cognitive Resources: Motivational Influences on Older Adults’ Cognitive Functioning,” presently appears online in the July 2014 issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. The work builds on research performed under multiple grants from the National Institute on Aging.
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Why We’re Wrong About Affirmative Action: Stereotypes, Testing and the ‘Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations’
The Huffington Post: Earlier this month a divided Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the University of Texas' right to use race amongst its criteria for undergraduate admissions, however limited that right may be. While the decision will be viewed as a small victory for supporters of race-based affirmative action, there is little reason to believe that the widely held claim that black and Latino students enter selective universities as comparatively inferior students will not cease to rear its ugly head.
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Recognizing The Illusion Of ‘Homo Economicus’
NPR: Standard economic theory assumes that humans behave rationally and are able to objectively calculate the value (or cost) of the different choices they are presented with. In fact, we pride ourselves on our rationality. Different from the animals, we humans have the unique capacity for logical thought and rational decision making. Or do we? According to behavioral economist Dan Ariely, we should be less proud of ourselves. In his entertaining book Predictably Irrational, Ariely describes case studies of everyday irrational human behavior. His simple but clever scientific experiments often require nothing more than a box of chocolates.
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Sometimes, Early Birds Are Too Early
The New York Times: Since the advent of the deadline, procrastinators have suffered society’s barbs for putting off until later what needs doing now. But it turns out that many people appear to be finishing things sooner than they need to get them done. They are “precrastinators,” researchers say. “There is an overwhelming tendency to precrastinate,” according to a paper published in May in the journal Psychological Science. The behavior might include answering trivial emails, for example, or paying bills far ahead of time. “It’s an irrational choice,” the paper said, but it also reflects the significant trade-offs people make to keep from feeling overwhelmed.
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Practice makes… some difference
The Boston Globe: IN HIS BEST-SELLING BOOK “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion—based on a 1993 article in a psychology journal—that top performers were mainly differentiated by extensive practice (10,000+ hours), and not innate ability. However, a new analysis of dozens of studies on the matter does “not support these strong claims,” finding instead that “practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions.” The importance of practice was particularly reduced for activities with low predictability, and when practice and performance were measured more objectively.
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How Tests Make Us Smarter
The New York Times: TESTS have a bad reputation in education circles these days: They take time, the critics say, put students under pressure and, in the case of standardized testing, crowd out other educational priorities. But the truth is that, used properly, testing as part of an educational routine provides an important tool not just to measure learning, but to promote it. In one study I published with Jeffrey D. Karpicke, a psychologist at Purdue, we assessed how well students remembered material they had read. After an initial reading, students were tested on some passages by being given a blank sheet of paper and asked to recall as much as possible.
