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Monthly Archives: December 2016

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In the News
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
December-28-2016

In the News

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The controversy over famous patient Henry Molaison — a.k.a. H.M. — is #7 on the Guardian’s list of top science news stories of 2016.

In brief: Luke Dittrich has accused memory researcher Suzanne Corkin of several ethical breaches — including shredding research — in her work with H.M. (Corkin’s peers have strongly defended her work.)

This story is rich in human interest: Dittrich, after all, is the grandson of the surgeon who — in an attempt to cure H.M.’s epilepsy — removed H.M.’s hippocampi.

And yet, given that Corkin’s work and H.M.’s story are foundational for many accounts of human memory, this controversy goes beyond family scandal to deep scientific import.

 

The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives and Our World by Anthony Biglan, PhD
Rebecca Gotlieb
Rebecca Gotlieb
December-27-2016

The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives and Our World by Anthony Biglan, PhD

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What if there existed a secret recipe for curing nearly all of our most serious societal ills? Dr. Anthony Biglan, a Senior Scientist at the Oregon Research Institute and an expert on the prevention of problematic behaviors in children and adolescents, may have that very recipe. In his new book, The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior can Improve Our Lives and Our World, Biglan argues that that our social and health problems would be greatly lessened—and we would have a more fulfilled and healthy citizenry—if we had a more caring society. Specifically, we would benefit from our families, schools, and communities being more nurturing and from our economic and political practices being more equitable and far-sighted. He argues that recent advances in psychological, behavioral, and developmental sciences have shown that the root cause of most of our major social challenges is our experiences in insufficiently nurturing environments. Through a series of concrete action items targeted towards parents, teachers and schools, regular citizens, and policy makers, Biglan shows us steps we can take to bring about this improved society.

After providing an overview of recent advances in the behavioral sciences that support the creation of nurturing environments, Biglan argues that families and schools are especially important environments for fostering nurturing relations. In homes and schools, we need to reward those who behave in a way that is considerate of others, help them think flexibly about solutions to challenging situations, teach them to regulate their emotions, and minimize the extent to which they feel coerced. To illustrate the implementation of these practices Biglan discusses intervention programs that have helped individuals and families create habits that nurture.

Biglan espouses B.F. Skinner’s idea that environments shape behavior. Most troubled teens are the product of environments that were insufficiently nurturing. Teens need limits, as well as, healthy relations with peers. They benefit from being around other teens with healthy and productive habits. He argues that we need schools to consistently implement evidence-based teaching practices, reinforce students’ good behavior, and let student learn by engaging in self-directed discovery.

While families and schools are vital places for increasing nurturance, Biglan states that we need also to make more nurturing the larger social structure in which families and schools are embedded. There are many organizations that address a single societal ill (e.g., drunk driving, homelessness, child abuse), but there are few umbrella organizations that attempt to address the root cause of all these problems, which is what Biglan argues we really need. Additionally, we need to curb predatory marketing practices, just as we did so effectively a few decades ago with curbing cigarette advertising, especially to teens. Beyond marketing, our materialistic culture leaves most of us feeling perpetually dissatisfied because we feel that what we have is never enough.

Biglan is concerned about growing economic inequality. He argues that many of us fail to conceive of just how challenging it is to live in poverty and just how easy it would be for even responsible and prosperous citizens to find themselves in poverty. We all suffer when poverty is widespread because such poverty leads to prevalent long-term health and behavioral problems. Biglan urges action to reduce child poverty. He argues that minimizing government spending, including on child poverty, is short-sighted because spending now could prevent much larger expenditures later.

Biglan concludes by sharing his vision for a society in which everyone enters adulthood ready to cultivate nurturing relationships and to create nurturing environments. The four most critical steps to help young people develop into caring adults is to model for them how to: 1) minimize toxic influences; 2) reward prosocial behavior; 3) limit opportunities to engage in aversive behavior; and 4) promote a flexible approach to living in accordance with one’s values in the face of challenging circumstances. Stress can erode a person’s health and the most common source of stress is managing other peoples’ coercive behavior. As such, for the sake of our collective health and well-being, we need to support one another in “turning the other cheek” in response to other people’s bad behavior, developing empathy, and paying attention to the present moment. With the steps Biglan suggests, we can all contribute to bringing about a social movement focused on creating nurturing environments to bring about, in turn, a brighter future.

 

Biglan, A. (2015). The nurture effect: How the science of human behavior can improve our lives and our world. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.

 

Does Internet Use “Rewire Adolescent Brains”?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
December-27-2016

Does Internet Use “Rewire Adolescent Brains”?

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Our very own Kathryn Mills says: we’ve got a lot of anecdotes, but not a lot of evidence, suggesting that internet use is meaningfully changing — much less damaging — adolescent brains.

For example: one study that Mills cites tracks 908 adolescents for 2 years, and finds no meaningful correlation between an increase in World Wide Web surfing and a reduction in free time physical activity. In other words: the couch potato stereotype might exist more on TV drama than in reality.

In brief: although our teacherly instincts might warn us that the Web has drastically  changed adolescent cognitive or social abilities, researchers haven’t yet found much evidence to confirm these fears.

To see Kathryn’s earlier articles for this blog, click here.

Drifting Away: The Cognitive Benefits—and Perils—of Mind-Wandering
Kevin Kent
Kevin Kent
December-17-2016

Drifting Away: The Cognitive Benefits—and Perils—of Mind-Wandering

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You’re in the middle of a meeting or driving to work and your mind drifts off to…

…chores on your to-do list, or

…a recent argument with a friend, or

…the grand possibilities of your future life.

You may not even realize you’ve departed on this train of thought until a friend or coworker quips: “Earth to Kevin, are you with us?”

During lectures in high school and college, or while trying to complete a dense reading assignment, I often caught myself failing to pay attention to my immediate environment. Much of the time, I would snap out of this state with the rude awakening that I had no idea what the professor was saying, or even what the last page of text said.

Recently, however, I’ve started to wonder if there are benefits to mind wandering, especially for learning.

For instance, absorbed in my internal world on long solo car trips, I have come up with creative ideas for beginning a blog post. Many of us are familiar with the experience of coming to insights about a tough problem while engaging in a completely unrelated activity.

(The most common place I’ve heard of this happening is in the shower, although I still don’t understand why this is the preferred location for these “ah ha” moments; alas, the research doesn’t seem to offer an explanation for this).

Do my anecdotal observations hold any elements of truth? What do researchers say about the impact of mind wandering on classroom learning? I’ll explore these questions and more in the following sections.

What is Mind-Wandering?

Researchers generally define mind-wandering as a state of “decoupled attention,” where attention is focused inward on self-generated thought instead of on the outside world.  Of course, one does not need to be aware of mind-wandering to be mind-wandering.

(As an ironic side note, the potential for unaware mind-wandering makes mind-wandering challenging to study—especially because those who are less aware of their mind-wandering tend to mind-wander more. [1])

Importantly, mind-wandering isn’t a passive state as it may seem from the outside. Instead, it can consist of racing thoughts, deep consideration, and interesting associations. Emotionally, these self-generated thoughts can have a positive or negative valence, and thus even have implications for pathologies like depression. [1]

Benefits of Mind-Wandering

From an evolutionary perspective, it seems logical that mind-wandering must have served a functional, adaptive purpose. After all, given how widespread a phenomenon mind-wandering is, it would not have developed or endured if it always harmed, never benefitted, the species.

In their review of the mind-wandering literature [1], Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan Schooler suggest several benefits of mind-wandering, including prospection and creativity.

1) Prospection

Often when people mind-wander, they contemplate situations that they might encounter in the future. For instance, a student trying to study the night prior to a big test may be distracted by thoughts of their parents’ or teacher’s reaction to a poor grade.

Even though this student may be distracted by such future-focused thoughts, this prospection might also offer real benefits. For example, the student might suddenly realize that, if she fails the test, the teacher will offer test corrections and extra-help.  

That is, prospective mind wandering can produce beneficial insights.

2) Creativity

There has been a lot of discussion in media and education circles lately about designing learning and schooling to promote creativity (see Sir Ken Robinson’s famous TED talk).

Some studies have suggested that mind-wandering can do just that.

For instance, Baird and colleagues [2] gave participants an everyday object—such as a brick—and asked them to think of as many potential uses for it as they could in 2 minutes. Researchers then gave some participants the opportunity to mind-wander, while preventing others from doing so. All participants then repeated their initial assignment: they had two minutes to think of distinct ways to use a brick.

Baird’s first key finding: during the second round, participants who mind-wandered during a mindless task thought of more ways to use a brick than those who had no chance to do so. That is: this mind-wandering promoted creativity.

Baird’s second key finding is perhaps more surprising. When mind-wanderers tried to think of uses for a new everyday object (a shovel rather than a brick), they were no better than those who did not mind-wander.

In short, Baird’s study suggests that mind-wandering boosts creativity in the middle of a cognitive process, not before it. Teachers who plan to promote mind-wandering should keep this scheduling note in mind.

Perils of Mind-Wandering: Reading Difficult Texts

Mind-wandering might benefits student with prospection and creativity, but it includes clear hazards as well.

In a 2013 study [3], researchers Shi Feng, Sidney D’Mello, and Art Graesser investigated mind-wandering and its relationship to reading comprehension.

Interestingly, they found that participants mind-wandered more while reading difficult texts than they did while reading simpler ones.

(This result is somewhat contradictory to some theories of mind-wandering. Reading difficult texts obviously requires working memory, and some researchers believe that mind-wandering needs excess working memory resources to take place.)

Feng hypothesized that readers of complex material could not build a deep and coherent picture of the text’s structure; in other words, they could not form a “situation model” that explained why events occurred or how a process worked.

In brief: text difficulty promotes mind-wandering, which in turn weakens the reader’s mental model and thereby reduces understanding.

This hypothesis helps explain my past experiences struggling to understand difficult information in history textbooks, or in a James Joyce story. Growing up dyslexic, I struggled with reading at its most fundamental level. To add to my woes, I would also find myself mindlessly tracking down a page…only to realize that the chores I was thinking about had nothing to do with the Joyce story I was supposed to be understanding.

Is there anything I could have done to curb my wandering mind and finally appreciate the literary genius of Dubliners without interruption?

How to Stay Focused

One intervention that seems to be promising is mindfulness training.

In a study by Mrazek and colleagues [4], participants completed either a two-week mindfulness program or a two-week nutrition class. Compared to those in the control condition, participants who meditated saw less mind-wandering, and enhanced performance on both reading and working memory tasks.

The authors hypothesized that the mindfulness intervention increased their ability to focus on the task at hand and suppress distracting thoughts [4]. With the numerous other benefits to meditation, it’s definitely worth a try!

(You might check out the many mindfulness posts by my Learning and the Brain blogging colleague, Rina Deshpande.)

Message for Education

So should we worry about that student who is mind-wandering during a lesson or while trying to read a difficult novel? The research seems to suggest that we should – especially during difficult problem-solving or reading.

However, some research also suggests that we should also recognize the value of task-unrelated, introspective thought, especially when either prospection or creativity will benefit learning [1].

We might also let students know that there is value in taking a break by stepping away from a project to do something less demanding: cooking a meal, or walking the dog. [2]

With the right blend of external focus and self-generated thought, our students can harness the benefits of mind-wandering while also staying focused at the right times to integrate and understand new information.

 

  1. Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2015). The science of mind wandering: empirically navigating the stream of consciousness. Annual review of psychology, 66, 487-518. [Article]
  2. Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W., Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by distraction mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science. [Article]
  3. Feng, S., D’Mello, S., & Graesser, A. C. (2013). Mind wandering while reading easy and difficult texts. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 20(3), 586-592. [Article]
  4. Mrazek, M. D., Franklin, M. S., Phillips, D. T., Baird, B., & Schooler, J. W. (2013). Mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering. Psychological Science. [Article]

 

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Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
December-16-2016

Power Poses: Meh

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This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education explains many reasons to doubt much-hyped research into–among other things–the “Wonder Woman Pose.”

Research Morsel: Gender Differences in Math (Again)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
December-12-2016

Research Morsel: Gender Differences in Math (Again)

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The journal Intelligence recently published an interesting study [1] analyzing gender differences in cognitive abilities in the US and India.

The question hovering in the background is—as it so often is—“are there innate gender differences in cognitive abilities?”

That is: we have lots of data showing gender differences in various measures of academic success; are those differences inherent in genders, or are they socially created? Or, a combination of both?

To answer this question, you might look at the very best performers in—say—math. If there are substantially more boys in the top 5% of math scorers, and if that substantial difference persists over time, then you might think that–all other things being equal–boys are innately better at math.

This study, however, shows that the difference has shrunk in the last twenty years—in both the US and India. If gender differences in math are innate, then these results are a shocker.

Of course, other readers might see this study reinforcing a theory of innate gender differences.

  1. Although there is a smaller difference in math success between genders, that difference does persist. That is: there are still more boys than girls at the very highest end of math performance.
  2. The gender difference at the high end of verbal performance has not changed. Girls still score higher than boys do on such tests.

In my view, this study tends to confirm the hypothesis that social forces exaggerate—and perhaps create—gender differences in academic performance.

  1. I suspect that gender differences in verbal performance haven’t changed because we haven’t focused on them with the same energy and creativity that we’ve used to promote girls’ self-perception in math.
  2. While math gender differences persist in the US and India, they vary quite widely by country [2]: an odd finding indeed if boys are naturally mathier than girls.

Reasons to be cautious when interpreting this article—and this blog post:

  1. This research looks at gender differences in one very specific way: math and verbal performance at the very high end (“the extreme right tail” of the bell curve). There are MANY other ways to consider these complex questions, and we shouldn’t let any one way determine our answer.
  2. We have only recently begun to understand that gender isn’t always binary. I don’t think many researchers in this field have found ways to analyze math performance of transgender students.
  3. The article is still behind a paywall, so I haven’t seen the numbers. You might want to look at the underlying data to see if you find it persuasive.
  4. I, of course, have my own biases:
    1. I think that gender differences in academic performance are much more likely to be socially created than innate [3, 4]. And so, it’s not surprising that I interpret this article as I have. (It’s also not surprising that I’ve decided to write about it for the blog.)
    2. More broadly, I think the “innate differences” hypothesis just isn’t helpful to teachers. My job is to help this student learn academic material—these facts, these procedures, these moral habits, these life lessons. If I clutter my brain with the belief that “girls can’t do math,” I do my students a deep disservice because I make it harder for them to learn. That is: my potentially false belief turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. All of Carol Dweck’s research [5, 6] and all Claude Steele’s research [7, 8], highlights this point.

If you’re especially interested in this topic, Lisa Damour—Director of Laurel School’s invaluable Center For Research on Girls—has produced many evidence-based summaries that can be helpful to your thinking.

  1. Makel, M. C., Wai, J., Peairs, K., & Putallaz, M. (2016). Sex differences in the right tail of cognitive abilities: An update and cross cultural extension. Intelligence, 59, 8-15.
  2. Else-Quest, N. M., Hyde, J. S., & Linn, M. C. (2010). Cross-national patterns of gender differences in mathematics: a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136(1), 103.
  3. Hyde, J. S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60(6), 581.
  4. Eliot, L. (2009). Pink brain, blue brain: How small differences grow into troublesome gaps – and what we can do about it. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
  5. Dweck, C. (2008). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Ballantine Books.
  6. Rattan, A., Good, C., & Dweck, C. S. (2012). “It’s ok—Not everyone can be good at math”: Instructors with an entity theory comfort (and demotivate) students. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(3), 731-737.
  7. Steele, C. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi: How stereotypes affect us and what we can do. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
  8. Murphy, M. C., Steele, C. M., & Gross, J. J. (2007). Signaling threat how situational cues affect women in math, science, and engineering settings. Psychological Science, 18(10), 879-885.

 

 

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