As of this writing, Jeopardy! champion James Holzhauer has won 24 games for a total of $1,867,142.00. A lot of people are wondering how he has done it. The next time you cover memory in Intro, ask your students to work in pairs or small groups to use what they learned in the memory chapter to guess at some strategies Holzhauer has used to remember such a vast amount of information and to be able to recall it. Did your students come up with self-testing? Spaced practice? Elaboration? Interleaving? Dual coding? Ask your students how they would use these techniques to prepare for their own Jeopardy! run. The Philadelphia Inquirer wanted to know how James Holzhauer has done, so they asked Penn psychology professor Michael J. Kahana and Utah ed psych professor Michael Gardner—and James Holzhauer (Avril, 2019). First, Holzhauer has learned a lot of content in different contexts. In addition to whatever knowledge he acquired through general reading or through school was learned again through his reading of children’s books—books that can cover a lot of ground in an easy-to-digest way. If Holzhauer learned about Napoleon in high school, for example, and then learned about Napoleon in a children’s book, he has that many more retrieval cues to recall what he knows about Napoleon—information that was learned at different times and different places. And, of course, since the task in playing Jeopardy! is retrieving information, it’s important to practice that retrieval through self-testing. Holzhauer confirms that he has indeed self-tested. Holzhauer uses priming to his advantage, both in unexpected and expected ways. If Final Jeopardy is a finite category, he mentally flips through possible answers. As an example, he cites the category “European Capitals.” By thinking about Budapest, Rome, Warsaw, Paris, Oslo, Brussels, he is firing up the neurons in his “European Capital” neural network, making it easier to retrieve the correct answer when the question finally comes. Outside of Final Jeopardy, Holzhauer says the game moves too fast to do this. When contestants choose all the questions from the same category one right after the other, though, everyone gets to stay within the same neural network. That’s not Holzhauer’s strategy, though. He jumps from category to category selecting all of the $500 answers first—to amass a good chunk of money that he can wager on a Daily Double. While he doesn’t have time to think through a list of possible answers, but since he knows which category he is going to select before he voices it, his brain does have a few seconds lead time over his competitors in accessing the right neural network. Interestingly, younger people can more quickly retrieve content from a new category than those of us who are older. That jumping from category to category likely gives him an advantage over older contestants. Then there is buzzer strategy. Is it better to wait until you know you know the answer and then buzz in? Or, is it better to buzz in and hope your brain can find the answer in those few seconds? Holzhauer uses the former strategy. Buzz in first and hope your working memory is able to quickly retrieve the answer from long-term memory. End this discussion by informing your students that if any of them go on to win on Jeopardy!, your cut is 10%.   Reference Avril, T. (2019, May 16). Can ‘Jeopardy!’ whiz James Holzhauer be beaten? The science of memory and recall, explained. The Inquirer. Retrieved from https://www.philly.com/science/jeopardy-champ-james-holzhauer-speed-psychology-20190516.html ... View more

Psychology students often struggle with the difference between the independent and dependent variables. After covering these concepts, ask students to work in pairs or small groups to identify both the independent variable(s) and the dependent variable(s) in each example. Hypothesis: Creating concrete examples will improve recall. "Students read a short text that introduced eight concepts. Some students were then prompted to generate concrete examples of each concept followed by definition restudy, whereas others only restudied definitions for the same amount of time. Two days later, students completed final tests involving example generation and definition cued recall." (In the definition cued recall test, the cues were the names of each of the concepts; the "recall" was the student writing down the definition.) Those who created their own examples of each of the concepts did better on the test than students who just restudied the concepts.  In this experiment, identify the independent variable and the dependent variable.  Rawson, K. A., & Dunlosky, J. (2016). How effective is example generation for learning declarative concepts? Educational Psychology Review, 28(3), 649–672. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-016-9377-z   Hypothesis: Attending to a phone will decrease the likelihood of seeing a unicycling clown. People, after walking across a college square, were asked if they saw a clown unicycling around a central sculpture. Only 25% of cell phone users reported seeing the clown as compared to 60% of people who were listening to music, 51% of people who were walking alone with no technological distractions, and 71% of people who were walking with another person. This type of study is called a quasi-experiment because participants weren't randomly assigned to conditions. In this experiment, identify the independent variable and the dependent variable.  Hyman, I. E., Boss, S. M., Wise, B. M., McKenzie, K. E., & Caggiano, J. M. (2010). Did you see the unicycling clown? Inattentional blindness while walking and talking on a cell phone.  Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24, 597–607. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1638   Hypothesis: Being sleep-deprived will increase the desire for high-calorie foods. After either get a full night’s sleep or staying awake all night, participants were asked how desirable each of 80 different foods were.  When participants were sleep-deprived, they found high-calorie foods more desirable than when they had a full night’s sleep. This type study is called a within-subjects design because the same participants got both the full night’s sleep and, on another night, stayed awake all night. In this experiment, identify the independent variable and the dependent variable.  Greer, S. M., Goldstein, A. N., & Walker, M. P. (2013). The impact of sleep deprivation on food desire in the human brain. Nature Communications, 4, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms3259   Hypothesis: “Inflated praise [will] decrease challenge-seeking in children with low self-esteem but [will] increase challenge-seeking in children with high self-esteem.” Children (ages 8 to 12), after having their self-esteem measured, “drew a famous painting… and were told that that a professional painter, who in reality did not exist, would examine their drawing.”  Each child then received a handwritten note that they were told was written by the painter. The note said either, “You made an incredibly beautiful drawing!,” “You made a beautiful drawing!,” or did not address the drawing. Children then could choose to replicate two easy drawings (“If you choose to draw these easy pictures, you won’t make many mistakes, but you won’t learn much either.”) or two difficult drawings (“If you choose to draw thsese difficult pictures, you might make many mistakes, but you’ll definitely learn a lot, too.”). Children with low self-esteem who received the incredibly beautiful praise were more likely to choose the easy drawings. Children with low self-esteem who received the beautiful praise were likely to choose the difficult drawings. Those results were reversed for children with low self-esteem. In this experiment, identify the two independent variables and the dependent variable. Brummelman, E., Thomaes, S., Orobio de Castro, B., Overbeek, G., & Bushman, B. J. (2014). “That’s not just beautiful-that’s incredibly beautiful!”: The adverse impact of inflated praise on children with low self-esteem. Psychological Science, 25(3), 728–735. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613514251   Hypothesis: Tasters will rate vinegar-laced beer as better than regular beer if they are not first told that vinegar has been added to the beer. Participants were invited to taste two different beers and express their preference for one over the other. Participants were told that the beer was laced with vinegar either before or after tasting or were told nothing. Participants who weren’t told that the beer was laced with vinegar or were told after they tasted it preferred it over the regular beer. Those who were told it was laced with vinegar before tasting it preferred the regular beer. In this experiment, identify the independent variable and the dependent variable. Lee, L., Frederick, S., & Ariely, D. (2006). Try it, you’ll like it: The influence of expectation, consumption, and revelation on preferences for beer. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1054–1058. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01829.x ... View more

In my previous blog post, I wrote, “All 25,000+ entries of the American Psychological Association (APA) Dictionary of Psychology are now freely available online. You may just want to let your students know that this resource exists and may be more trustworthy than other sources of definitions for psychological terms students find through a Google search.” Then I described an activity where students would look up terms and identify the most interesting ones to share with the class. The APA Dictionary of Psychology can also be used for source terms in a popular ice breaker. In the Name Game ice breaker, when introducing themselves, the student says their first name and some word in a given category that starts with the first initial of their first name. If the category is animals, I would introduce myself as Sue the Snake. If the category is adjectives, I would introduce myself as Surprising Sue. If the category is hobbies, I would introduce myself as Skydiving Sue. No, I haven’t skydived, but I bet people would remember my name, though! The idea is to attach some imagery or emotion to a person and their name that will act as a retrieval cue later. Students may not remember “Sue,” but if they remember snake, surprising, or skydiving, the “s” may be enough of a retrieval cue to recall “Sue.” (If you do the Name Game ice breaker, consider revisiting why it works when you get to the memory chapter.) For the Intro Psych Name Game ice breaker, students are to look up, using their web-enabled device, APA Dictionary of Psychology terms that start with the first letter of their first name. Students are looking for something in the definition of the term that connects with themselves. When students introduce themselves to the class (or introduce themselves to a group if you have a large section), students need to explain the term and why they chose it. Use this opportunity to talk more about the concept and what chapter it will appear in if it’s covered in your course. If it’s not a term your course covers, you can talk about what chapter it would appear in or what advanced psychology course it may appear in. (If your students are introducing themselves in groups, mingle with the groups to listen for the terms that they use. After groups are done with their introductions, share some of the terms you heard with the class as a whole.) Before turning students loose to do this activity, use yourself as an example. Here are some examples I could use for me. I’ve specifically chosen these terms because I cover them in my course. Somatosensory Area Sue. Soma means body. The somatosensory area of the brain is responsible for things like the sense of touch and kinesthesia (knowing where my limbs are positioned). It allows me to feel this marker and know that my arm is raised. We’ll cover the somatosensory area in the neuroscience chapter. Sleep Hygiene Sue. Sleep hygiene is doing what you need to do in order to get good sleep. I chose it because getting good sleep is incredibly important. We’ll cover sleep in the neuroscience chapter. Social Learning Sue. Social learning is the learning that “is facilitated through social interactions with other individuals.” I chose it because in this course, you’re going to be working a lot in groups and learning with and through your peers. We’ll cover social learning in the learning chapter. Social Psychology Sue. Social psychology is about how we influence others and how others influence us. I chose it because my degree is in social psychology. That means that I’m not a psychotherapist. We’ll cover social psychology in the… wait for it… social psychology chapter. As I wrote in the previous blog post on using the , “With over 25,000 terms in this dictionary, it’s likely that students will come up with something you’ve never heard of. Now is a good time to practice the humility that’s necessary when teaching Intro Psych. Students generate a lot of questions in this course. The chances that they will ask something you don’t know about is very likely. It’s okay to say, ‘I don’t know.’ If it’s in the area of something that you do know, add what you do know.” The conclusion is the same as the previous post. “Through this activity, students will get a sense of how broad of a field psychology is and how much area the Intro Psych course is going to cover, and you will learn a bunch of new concepts. What’s not to love about that?” ... View more

Change is hard. Once you’ve learned to do something one way, it can be very difficult to do it a different way, even when you know that that different way would be better. Heck, we all know we should exercise more, eat better, and sleep – both more and better. Physicians used to think that all they had to do was educate their patients, and their patients would make those changes. People, of course, are not that simple. That’s one reason that integrated healthcare is becoming popular. Having a psychologist on the team – someone who understands behavior – can make a big difference in someone’s health outcomes. We know what good study strategies look like (Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, & Willingham, 2013). We share these with our students, our students think they are all good ideas, but how many students actually make the change? It’s a risky move to give up a less-than-ideal study strategy that will probably get a C for a never-tried study strategy. We’re psychologists. We know that an effective route to behavioral change is through baby steps, foot-in-the-door, if you will. Toshiya Miyatsu and colleagues (2018) have identified some of the most popular study strategies that students are already using and have made recommendations of how students can tweak them to use them more effectively. Below is a summary of their recommendations. Rereading, used by 78% of students in the studies identified by Miyatsu, et al. (2018). Because rereading is usually passive, we expect poorer learning outcomes. If students are going to reread, they should space out their rereading (spacing effect), and before rereading they should try to recall all that they remember from their last reading session (retrieval practice). Underlining and highlighting, used by 53% of students in the studies identified by Miyatsu, et al. (2018). This strategy can also be passive. Lesser-skilled readers have a hard time identifying what is important in a text resulting in too much or too little underlined or highlighted. Teaching students how to identify the important information in a text makes a difference. Students should wait until their second reading to underline/highlight. After reading a chapter or a section of a chapter, it’s easier to identify the important content (elaborative processing). Also, teach students how to see the structure of the text (see outlining next). Outlining, used by 23% of students in the studies identified by Miyatsu, et al. (2018). If instructors give the outline or give a partial outline, students do better. If the students create the outline, they don’t do better as compared to other study techniques, unless they received training in how to outline. Seeing the structure of the text helps readers find the key points. After having the outline, students can use it for it retrieval practice, e.g., “What were the supporting ideas for point B in this section?” Remind students to look at the outline at the beginning of the chapters of their textbooks. Taking 30 seconds to read through it will give the students a framework that will help them structure what they will be reading. Note-taking, used by 30% of students in the studies identified by Miyatsu, et al. (2018). The big questions about note-taking are how students take notes and whether they are permitted to review their notes before recall. If notes are hand-written, students tend to condense what they are learning and convert it into their own words – fewer notes, but more elaborative processing. If notes are typed on a computer, students tend to transcribe – more notes, but less elaborative processing. On recall tests where the notes are not reviewed, the hand-written note-takers out-perform the typists. If the note-takers are permitted to review their notes prior to recall, the typists may or may not out-perform the hand-writers. Because the research in this area is still pretty scant, the best recommendation to students is, “Review your notes.” Flash cards, used by 55% of students in the studies identified by Miyatsu, et al. (2018). Flash cards are all about retrieval practice. Students should continue to practice recalling items they’ve already learned. Flash card sessions should be spaced out (spacing effect). Message to students: You’ve been using “My Study Strategies v. 1.0.” You don’t have to throw those out if you’re not ready to, but it is time to use your study strategies more effectively. Up your game to “My Study Strategies v. 2.0” by heeding these recommendations.   References Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Supplement, 14 (1), 4–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266 Miyatsu, T., Nguyen, K., & McDaniel, M. A. (2018). Five popular study strategies: Their pitfalls and optimal implementations. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13 (3), 390–407. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617710510 ... View more

In an earlier post, I offered my nominee for psychology’s most misunderstood concept: negative reinforcement (which is not a punishing, but a rewarding event—withdrawing or reducing something aversive, as when taking ibuprofen leads to relief from a headache).  Second place on the most-misunderstood list went to heritability. Students often wrongly think that if intelligence is 50 percent heritable then “half of our intelligence is due to our genes.” Actually, 50 percent heritability would mean that, within the population studied, half of the variation among individuals is attributable to genes. Now my bronze medal award in the most-misunderstood competition: short-term memory. The misuse of the word appeared repeatedly in an otherwise excellent talk I recently heard on care for people with early-stage Alzheimer’s. For example, we were told that “They often have good long-term memory for their earlier life, but have lost their short-term memory for what they did yesterday.” The presenter, in very good company, didn’t understand that psychologists define short-term memory as the seconds-long memory of, for example, the phone number we’re about to enter in our phone, or of an experience we’ve just had and are processing for long-term storage. The dementia-related memory problem described was not the result of short-term memory loss. Rather, it demonstrated an inability to transfer short-term memories into long-term storage, from which the person could retrieve the experience an hour or a day later. (Our memory of yesterday is a long-term memory.) Negative reinforcement, heritability, and short-term memory are my gold, silver, and bronze medal winners among psychology’s popularly misunderstood concepts. Perhaps you have other nominees from your experience? ... View more

Just two days after the Parkland, Florida high school shooting, a colleague appeared at my office door on the Highline College campus and said, “I just heard 6 to 8 shots and people screaming.” We waved people into our small office building, and then secured the doors. And waited. Campus Security sent out periodic computer pop-ups, texts, and emails with updates – 8 in all, from the first alert to the all-clear. The communication was welcome. A colleague locked in a classroom with her students had a live feed from a local news station playing on the classroom computer. After dozens of police officers spent two and a half hours going over the college’s 80 acres with a fine-tooth comb – no fewer than 8 rifle-bearing officers looked through the shrubbery in front of our building – no victim(s) and no shooter were found. One campus rumor says that it was lunar new year firecrackers, but I haven’t seen anything that looks like an official report yet. Less than an hour after my colleague came to my door, I got a text from a friend in Harrisonburg, VA asking if I was okay. Harrisonburg is 2,804 miles away; Google Maps says I can drive there in “41 hours without traffic.” I did a news search about halfway into our lockdown and found a report by a UK news outlet. While I understand that we no longer rely on the Pony Express to deliver news, I was still surprised at the speed the news traveled. Especially when there were no known victims. Just the promise of tragedy was enough to send the news around the world. What happens when you barricade a bunch of social science faculty in a small space? You get an impromptu interdisciplinary panel discussion on gun violence courtesy of a political scientist, sociologist, and psychologist. I imagine this would make for a popular course. In my Intro Psych class for this coming week, the topics happen to include the availability heuristic and priming. The availability heuristic tells us that hearing about every mass shooting (or non-shooting as it was on my campus) affects our estimates of violence. Our own non-shooting prompted more than one student or family member of a student to report to journalists that they are considering enrolling only in online classes. Being primed with the Parkland shooting likely influenced the perception of the pops heard on my campus as gunshots and the beginnings of a mass shooting. (The pops may have very well been gunshots and not firecrackers, although the police reported finding no shell casings.) Even though, in the end, it appears that the students and employees of Highline College were never in any danger, that doesn’t erase the terror that so many felt at the time. One student emailed her professor the next day to say that she hasn’t been able to concentrate on studying because of the trauma of running for her life. About 24-hours later, I received a text from a colleague suggesting what we should do differently if we were to experience this again; she’s still processing it. Normal responses. “Resources for dealing with a school shooting” The Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (SCCAP; Division 53 of the American Psychological Association) has created a wiki page of resources. They’re working on putting together a Wikipedia page, but in the meantime you can find their resources for professionals, caregivers, educators, and the public on this Wikiversity page. Several of the resources are curated from The National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN). Here’s a direct link to the NCTSN “School Shooting Response” page. The SCCAP Wikiversity page is a work in progress; check it periodically for updates. ... View more

After covering the memory chapter, provide this excerpt from the Michigan Supreme Court case #155245, People vs. Elisah Kyle Thomas, to your students. One evening, as the complainant [victim] walked to a nearby restaurant, he passed a man he did not know.  About 15 minutes later, after leaving the restaurant, the complainant was approached by the man he had passed by earlier.  The man pointed a gun at the complainant and demanded that he empty his pockets.  The complainant handed over $10 but the robber wanted more.  The complainant threw a soda can at the robber and ran. The robber followed, firing multiple shots, one of which struck the complainant in his leg. The complainant went to a nearby church and the pastor called 9-1-1.    In the ambulance, the complainant gave an officer a description of the robber. Another officer canvassed the area and saw the defendant Elisah Kyle Thomas, who matched the description. The officer stopped the defendant but let him go after learning that he had no outstanding warrants. Before letting the defendant go, however, the officer took a photograph of him with her cell phone.  The officer immediately went to the hospital and asked the complainant to describe the robber.  After the complainant gave a description, the officer showed him the photo and asked “was this him?”  The complainant started to cry and said “that’s him.”    And then add: The victim “remembered both that the assailant’s weapon was ‘a black and gray nine millimeter handgun and that the assailant held it in his right hand,’” “the identification occurred approximately a half hour to an hour after the crime,” and “the victim identified the person in the photograph as the assailant within a few seconds of seeing the photograph.” [Note, not to be read aloud to your students: these quotes are from the APA amicus brief. I’d cite it, but citing an amicus brief in APA style is not a straightforward affair. For those of you who love that sort of thing – you know who you are – feel free to figure it out and email it to me at sfrantz@highline.edu. I’ll update this blog post with any version that looks like it could be right.] Now, ask students to take a couple minutes and consider how much they trust the eyewitness’ memory of the robber. If you use a classroom responses system, ask students to render a verdict based on the evidence given: guilty, not guilty, not sure. In pairs or small groups, ask students to identify why they trust/don’t trust the eyewitness’ memory. Invite volunteers to share their thoughts. What happened with this case? The trial court found that the “single-suspect lineup” and asking “was this him?” was suggestive and dismissed the charges. The Michigan Court of Appeals disagreed and allowed the evidence. The Michigan Supreme Court, however, agreed with the trial court and also – and for good – dismissed the charges (Beattey & Calkins, 2018). The American Psychological Association (APA) filed an amicus brief to the court (read the summary here; read the full amicus brief here) explaining why the identification was suspect: “[t]he victim observed the assailant for a very short time,” “[t]he victim had only a partial view of the defendant’s features,” “[t]he assailant was a stranger to the victim,” and “[t]he robbery was a highly stressful situation.” The reasoning the Court of Appeals gave for reinstating the charges was based on some common misunderstandings of memory. The APA amicus brief addressed these as well: “[t]he victim’s detailed memory of the assailant’s weapon makes his memory less reliable, not more,” “[m]emories degrade very quickly,” and “[t]he victim’s confidence does not indicate that his memory was accurate.” If your students were ready to convict based on the eyewitness testimony, review what the research tells us about memory as it applies to this court case before leaving the chapter. References Beattey, R. A., & Calkins, C. (2018, February). The legal system follows the empirical evidence on eyewitness identification. Monitor on Psychology , 29. Retrieved from http://www.apamonitor-digital.org/apamonitor/201802/MobilePagedReplica.action?pm=2&folio=28#pg31   ... View more

One of my favorite sources for examples of psychological concepts are comic strips. Some of them get worked into lectures, others show up on exams, and sometimes I’ll offer them for a couple points extra credit, especially for new comics that harken back to content covered earlier in the course. Here are some May 14, 2017 comic strips that may be worth adding to your stable of examples. The Betty comic strip gives us a wonderful example of change blindness. Junior, Betty’s son, is dinking around on his phone while explaining his generation’s amazing ability to multitask. During his explanation, Betty calls in her husband to take her place. When Junior’s attention is returned to his parent, he sees his dad and is completely unaware that he had replaced his mom. In Frank and Ernest Frank has a young person working out on his farm. The young person, upon hearing “crop,” thinks cropping photos instead of crops that are planted. For someone who spends a lot of time in the digital world instead of a farming world, that person would be primed to interpret “crop” as photo manipulation. Frazz gives us commentary on the positive reinforcement provided by smartphones. Pick up your smartphone to get a jolt of pleasure in some form – text messages, phone calls, games, social media updates. Caulfield, the boy in the strip, says that his dad “calls them dopamine pumps.” (If you want to dive deeper into smartphone use, I wrote a post on stress and smartphones a few months ago.) Bonus comic strip. My favorite classical conditioning comic strip comes from Lio (November 14, 2009). A monster replaces Pavlov’s dogs, “Monsta Treats” replace meat powder, and the sound of a ripping bag replaces the tone. Do you have any favorite comic strips that illustrate psychological concepts?   ... View more

Macmillan Learning is proud to announce that Psychology 4e and Introducing Psychology 3e author Daniel L. Schacter (Harvard University) will be receiving the William James Fellow Award at the Association for Psychological Science Annual Convention in Boston. The William James Fellow award recognizes individuals who have used their professional careers to make profound contributions to the science of psychology. The groundbreaking work Schacter has done over the past 35 years on the triumphs and failures of memory has exhibited the very nature of memory. Schacter has aptly titled his award “Adaptive Constructive Processes in Memory and Imagination,” as he has explored how memory works as a cognitive “virtual reality simulator” by taking past events as a way of imaging the future. Attending APS in Boston this May? Join us on Friday May 26 at 4:15pm at the Worth Publishers/Macmillan Learning booth, #410 to congratulate Schacter on his achievements. Coffee and refreshments will be served. ... View more

If the hardiest weed in our cognitive neuroscience garden is that “we only use 10 percent of our brains,” the next hardiest weed is this myth: “All our past experience is ‘in there’ and potentially retrievable by hypnosis or brain stimulation.”   I could almost believe this, after marveling at my aging mother-in-law, a retired pianist and organist. At age 88, her blind eyes could no longer read music. But sitting at a keyboard, she could flawlessly play hundreds of hymns, even ones she had not thought of for 20 years.   How and where did her brain store those myriad notes? For a time, some surgeons and memory researchers marveled at patients’ apparently vivid memories triggered by brain stimulation during surgery. Did this prove that our whole past, not just well-practiced music, is “in there,” in complete detail, just waiting to be relived?   That’s what neurosurgeon Ben Carson presumed in this 2013 tweet: And that’s what he said again on March 6 th in his first speech as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development: “I could take the oldest person here, make a hole right here on the side of the head, and put some depth electrodes into their hippocampus and stimulate, and they would be able to recite back to you verbatim a book they read 60 years ago. It’s all there; it doesn’t go away.”   Alas, everything is wrong about this. Our flawed memories, as every introductory psychology student learns, are constructions that incorporate both our past and recent experiences. Moreover, the hippocampus, while a vital part of our memory processing, is not a long-term computer memory stick.   And about those brain-stimulated memory flashbacks . . . . As Elizabeth Loftus has reported, they appear invented, not a vivid reliving of long-forgotten experiences. But our memory imperfections have a silver lining. As Williams James wrote in Principles of Psychology, “If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.” To discard the clutter of useless or out-of-date information—where we parked the car yesterday or our old phone number—is surely a blessing. So be glad that neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who knows a lot, is wrong about memory. ... View more

Last month (January 2017), the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) issued a memo to law enforcement and prosecutors. The subject of the memo was “Eyewitness Identification: Procedures for Conducting Photo Arrays.” The DoJ’s last document that dealt with photo arrays was released in 1999. The authors of this memo acknowledge that a lot of research on eyewitness identification has happened since then, and that it was time to incorporate that research into new guidelines. The information provided in this document would make a nice addition to your coverage of memory in Intro Psych. It’s a wonderful example of how psychological research can be applied in real-world settings, and in this case, where people’s lives are at stake. The DoJ recommends that the police officer who is showing the eyewitness photographs of potential perpetrators be blind to the suspect. In other words, the police officer who is showing the photographs has no idea who his/her fellow police officers suspect is the perpetrator. This is for the same reasons researchers are blind to conditions – to avoid unintentionally cuing the eyewitness/research participant. If it’s a small police department, they might not have someone available to show the photographs who does not know who the suspect is. In that case, the DoJ recommends that the officer be “blinded,” where the officer doesn’t know which photograph the eyewitness is looking at any given time. Even better, the DoJ suggests having the photographs presented on a computer screen so no one else needs to be present. Another DoJ recommendation is that eyewitnesses, after identifying a photograph as that of the perpetrator, make a rating of confidence in their own words. “[N]ew research finds that a witness’s confidence at the time of an initial identification is a reliable indicator of accuracy.” Ask students, given what they now know about memory construction, what they would think if they were on a jury and the witness’s confidence at initial identification was very low but when on the witness stand during the trial was very high. Whatever procedures a law enforcement department uses, the DoJ recommends video recording the process. That’s the best proof that the eyewitness’ memory was not inadvertently (or intentionally) contaminated. If time allows, after discussing memory but before discussing the guidelines yourself, invite students to create them. With students working in small groups, ask students to create recommendations to law enforcement regarding the showing of suspect photographs to eyewitnesses. What recommendations do students have for how the photos should be displayed and what the officer showing the photographs should do or not do? After discussion dies down, ask volunteers to share the recommendations from their groups with rationales. And then highlight for students some of the DoJ recommendations. ... View more

Originally posted on August 2, 2016. News flash . . . from the current New Yorker (July 24, 2016), Wall Street Journal (July 25, 2016), and Time (August 8, 2016) . . . “In the most rigorous study to date, researchers pitted different types of cognitive training head-to-head and concluded that one strategy in particular—a kind of computerized brain training that helps the mind to process information more quickly—can significantly lower rates of cognitive decline and dementia.” So impressed is Time (from which those words come) that it promotes, at the article’s conclusion, a smartphone app available for $96 annually that the researcher recommends “for everyone over 50. . . . There’s now evidence that this type of training has multiple benefits, the risk is minimal, and it’s not even expensive.” Money can’t buy advertising that credible-seeming. And the study is, indeed, impressive-sounding. It reportedly trained nearly 3000 people for five weeks and then followed them for 10 years. But is this a case of premature hyping of research (via a University of South Florida press release)? Other prominent researchers with whom I have corresponded raise two caution flags. First, a 2014 scientific consensus statement found “no compelling scientific evidence” that brain games can reduce or reverse cognitive decline and warned against “exaggerated and misleading claims.” Researcher Zach Hambrick summarizes: “Play a video game and you’ll get better at that video game, and maybe at very similar video games,” but not at driving a car or filling out your tax return. What is more, new research reviews—here and forthcoming in Psychological Science in the Public Interest (“Do ‘Brain Training’ Programs Work?”)—confirm that brain training appears not to produce any lasting, meaningful change apart from the training task. Second, the newly reported findings, though presented at a convention, have not yet been published. As the New Yorker writer acknowledged, the “findings may not stand up to peer review, or they may turn out to be a fluke that cannot be replicated by others. Perhaps her central conclusion—that a dozen hours of training cuts the risk of dementia nearly in half, ten years later—will have to be walked back.” With this level of publicity (including other outlets) there’s no easy walking back the public message. Will this big new study point us toward a brain-training program that does work? Stay tuned. And until such evidence is published and replicated, I’d suggest that we psychological educators not over promise. ... View more

Years ago, as a young instructor, I didn’t have the tools to help my struggling students who came to my office for studying advice. I had a clear idea of what “studying” was since I had done it for so long, but I don’t know if it’s that I couldn’t put words to what I did to study or if I assumed that everyone did the same thing when “studying,” and that if that didn’t work, I didn’t know what would. In any case, over time, I got better at my advice – test yourself, space out your studying, for example. One term I had a student who earned a perfect score on an exam. Students in the class knew somebody did, and they asked who it was. I said I couldn’t reveal the person’s name, but that person can if so desired. My perfect-score student immediately said, “I did! And I’m proud of it.” The other students began peppering her with some version of “How did you do it!” She explained that she spent time every day on the class. She read the textbook, took notes, merged her textbook notes with her class notes, thought of examples, tested herself over what she was learning. Students started exclaiming, “Oh! I don’t want to do all of that!” Her response? “Then you don’t get an A.” Learning is hard work. There’s no way around it. For students who are willing and able to put in the hard work, I want them to use effective, research-based study techniques. Unfortunately, students may not know what those research-based study techniques are. Some of the techniques students use may be a complete waste of time. Gurung, Weidert, and Jeske (2010) asked 120 students to complete a questionnaire on 35 different study behaviors. The behaviors that correlated positively with the students’ final exam scores: “attended every class,” “answered every question in the study guide,” “used practice exams to study,” and “was able to explain a problem or phenomenon using the material.” Behaviors that correlated negatively with exam scores: “after class, I looked over my notes to check for and fill in missing information,” “highlighted the most important information in each chapter to review later,” “reviewed the chapter after the lecture on that topic,” “asked… a classmate/friend to explain material I didn’t understand,” and “asked the professor or TAs for additional materials.” Interestingly, when they looked at just the top half of exam performers, only one correlation remained. Those who reported highlighting as a study strategy scored lower than those who did not. Highlighting is easy to do – it’s too easy to do. It doesn’t require deep processing; it’s a very shallow process. But at the end, with words highlighted, it’s easy to fool oneself into thinking studying was accomplished. Highlighting is really just coloring – and there are reasons coloring is relaxing: it takes little to no cognitive effort. Now, how about some advice on how to study? Yana Weinstein (UMass Lowell) and Megan Smith (Rhode Island College) of the LearningScientists.org blog have created a wonderful set of posters (slides and sticker templates) to help students learn how to study better. The strategies: spaced practice, retrieval practice, elaboration, interleaving, concrete examples, and dual coding. Side note: I love the use of the very specific word practice instead of the fuzzier word study. Elliott Hammer (2016) reports that “I’m also trying as of late to drop the word ‘study’ from my vocabulary in favor of ‘practice. It’s difficult to get students to be more active in their approach, and I want them to get beyond simply trying to read and call that studying. I don’t have data showing that the switch is working, but it feels more genuine.” To get your students to dive into these learning strategies, after covering the memory chapter, ask students to explain why each strategy is effective based on the concepts and research covered in their reading. This makes a nice out-of-class assignment, but it would also work well done in class with small groups. Give each small group the set of posters to explain the effectiveness of each. After discussion wanes, ask a group to report out on one of the posters; give other groups an opportunity to add to the conversation. Move onto another group, and ask them to report out on a different poster. Continue until all of the posters have been covered. If you use a classroom response system, ask students if they currently use the study strategy and whether they plan to use it in the future. Or you could do a jigsaw classroom. Divide the class into 6 groups of at least 6 members each (or 12 groups of at least 6 members or some other multiple of 6, depending on your class size) and give each group a different poster. (For smaller classes, use multiples of 3 and give each group 2 posters). After each group identifies why the strategy is effective (using the concepts learned in the memory chapter), break apart the groups so that at least one person from each group now forms a new group. Ask each new group member to share the strategy on their poster and explain why the strategy is effective. Bonus: Use the Gurung, et.al. (2010) study as examples when you cover correlations in the research methods chapter. Or use it here in the memory chapter to reinforce correlations. And then ask students which learning strategy is being used in the practice of learning correlations.   References Gurung, R. A., Weidert, J., & Jeske, A. (2010). Focusing on how students study. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 10(1), 28-35. Hammer, E. (2016, July 31). I’m a member of STP and this is how I teach. Retrieved from http://teachpsych.org/page-1703896/4186852 ... View more

Prosopagnosia – face blindness – used to be thought a rare condition caused only by head trauma. We now know that is not that rare – 2% in the U.S., perhaps (Radden Keefe, 2016) – and that the cause can also be genetic. It also used to be thought that you were either normal or had prosopagnosia. We now know that facial recognition falls on a spectrum. If there is an end of the spectrum where faces are not recognized, it stands to reason that there is another end of the spectrum where faces are easily recognized. And there is research to back up that reasoning. They are called super-recognizers. For your students who are 18+, invite them to take the Cambridge Face Memory Test.  “The average score on this test is around 80% correct responses for adult participants.” The page gives 60% as the cut-off for potential face blindness. I came in at 68%. I should add that this test uses only Caucasian males.  Those of you familiar with the other-race effect may wonder about that. And you are right to wonder. They created a Chinese version and compared performance of participants of European descent and participants of Asian descent on both the Chinese version and the European version. As predicted by the other-race effect, participants of Asian descent did well on the Chinese version (average of 85% correct) but less well on the European version (average of 73% correct). Participants of European descent did well on the European version (76%), but less well on the Chinese version (average of 66%) (McKone, et.al., 2012). Developmental psychologists may be wondering how kids perform. A separate study with five- to twelve-year-olds found that kids develop better facial memory as they age. For example, five-year-olds got 66% correct, 8-year-olds got 76% correct, and 12-year-olds got 85% correct (Croydon, et.al., 2014).  While we’re in the middle of this topic, I might as well throw in how good crows are at recognizing human faces (see this article for more information). Don’t ever tick off a crow. What about those super-recognizers, though? How do they perform? Russell, Duchaine, and Nakayama (2009) found four people who were likely candidates for super-recognizer status. They tested them using the Cambridge Face Memory Test. Three of them earned perfect scores; one person missed one. And what are super-recognizers looking at when they look at a face? The eyes? Nope. The nose. It’s unlikely that that’s because the nose has some sort of special significance. It’s more likely that it’s because the nose is in the center of the face, allowing the super-recognizer to take in the whole face (Bobak & Bate, 2016). The forensically-minded may be wondering if the power of super-recognizers could be harnessed to fight crime. Yes, yes it can. New Scotland Yard created the Super-Recogniser Unit comprised of seven (as of August, 2016) police officers who are, well, super-recognizers. What do they do? Most commonly they look at closed circuit television (CCTV) video of crime suspects, and they look at photos of people who have been arrested. They are looking for a match. “It is not uncommon for a super-recognizer, out on the town with friends, to bolt off after spotting someone with an outstanding warrant.” One officer, James Rabbett, “since joining the team full time, six months ago… has made nearly six hundred identifications.” Yeah, but can’t computer recognition software do the same thing? Following riots in London, computers pegged one rioter. How did a super-recognizer do? He identified 190. Are they sometimes wrong? Yep. About 13% of the time. Their identifications alone are not enough to convict, though. Instead their identifications “help direct the investigation” (Radden Keefe, 2016). After sharing this information with students, ask students where else the power of super-recognizers could be put to good use. If students need a hint, point out that looking at ID and looking then looking at someone’s face requires some facial recognition power. Shout out to Ruth Frickle (Highline College) for posting the Radden Keefe New Yorker article to the STP Facebook page, an act that sent me down this research rabbit hole. References Bobak, A. K., & Bate, S. (2016, February 2). Superior face recognition: A very special super power. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superior-face-recognition-a-very-special-super-power Croydon, A., Pimperton, H., Ewing, L., Duchaine, B. C., & Pellicano, E. (2014). The Cambridge Face Memory Test for Children (CFMT-C): A new tool for measuring face recognition skills in childhood. Neuropsychologia, 62, 60-67. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.07.008 McKone, E., Stokes, S., Liu, J., Cohan, S., Fiorentini, C., Pidcock, M., . . . Pelleg, M. (2012). A robust method of measuring other-race and other-ethnicity effects: The Cambridge Face Memory Test format. PLoS ONE, 7(10). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0047956 Radden Keefe, P. (2016, August 15). The detectives who never forget a face. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/londons-super-recognizer-police-force Russell, R., Duchaine, B., & Nakayama, K. (2009). Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16(2), 252-257. doi:10.3758/pbr.16.2.252 ... View more

Originally posted on July 17, 2014. Lloyd Cosgrove was his town’s city manager, butcher, and Presbyterian minister. He had a shiny head, bushy eyebrows, and a whooping laugh. If you want Lloyd to remain unique, try not to think about him too much. Why? Repetition breeds bland memories. Our brain’s memory center, the hippocampus, leaves different traces of information each time we call up something from our past. This is why our memories of the same past events shift. What gets left behind are the details. You might forget that Lloyd was a butcher or blocked out his whooping laughter. Or you might invent new details about him. Was he a Presbyterian or Lutheran minister? A city manager or a city councilman? Memory is a funny thing. In a recent study, people who rehearsed an event three times recalled fewer details compared with people who rehearsed the same event once. Repetition improved how well people recognized pieces of information, but it squeezed out the details. We might romanticize details. Do I need to remember the outfit my wife wore on our first date? (I do.) Do I need to remember where I ate my first taco? (I don’t.) Or should I become content that the details that add color, meaning, and spice to my daily experiences will become gray, hallow, and bland the more my memory plays them back? Ask me tomorrow. I’ll have a different memory of the question than I do today. ... View more

Originally posted on October 9, 2014. Have you ever just met someone, learned his name, and immediately forgotten it? This happens all of the time. People try all sorts of tricks to remember names, driving routes, or the location of your favorite Hong Kong noodle house. But we might be looking in the wrong spot. All we need is a healthy dose of electricity. In a brilliant study , a group of Northwestern University researchers recruited volunteers and had them undergo a stimulating treatment. Each day for five days, the volunteers had a part of their brain stimulated using a technique called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). The brain stimulation sessions lasted 20 minutes and targeted the hippocampus, which aids memory. To have a basis of comparison, the same volunteers also completed a week of sessions in which they did not receive brain stimulation. The trick was that the volunteers didn’t know when their brains had been zapped and when they hadn’t. Did the brain zapping improve memory? It did. The brain stimulation also improved how well the hippocampus “talked” to other nearby brain regions, an effect called functional connectivity. My favorite finding was that the brain stimulation effects persisted 24 hours after the volunteers underwent the treatment. Stimulate now, remember better later.  What does this mean? Should we forgo other memory strategies and instead buy a brain stimulation machine? I think not. These findings simply shed light on how the mind works and new ways we can improve how it functions. ... View more

Originally posted on October 16, 2014. One of my earliest memories is my dad giving me a high five. He was training for a marathon and agreed to take me, his talkative four year-old, on a run. I ran an entire mile. When I finished, red-faced and smiling, he said, “Give me five, son.” It was my first high five. According to a new study, high fives go a long way in motivating children. Five and six year-old children completed a task in which they imagined experiencing success. Next, the children received different types of praise. Some children received verbal praise that would highlight an individual trait (“You are a good drawer”), whereas other children received a high five. What motivated the children more, clear praise for being good at something or a high five? The high five won handedly. When the children bumped into a setback, those who received a high five persisted more than the other kids did. We might reconsider how we praise children’s behavior. If we tell children they’re geniuses, we’ve told them that they have a stable trait that isn’t under their control. If they fail a test, the responsibility can’t be theirs because they have a trait that should guarantee success on all intelligence test. Blame the teacher. Criticize the test. Give up and find something else to do. Don’t find a better way to study. By giving a high five, children know they have done something well. They also know that their success is under their control. I have run many miles since my first high five, but that first one with my dad will always hold a special place in my heart. It motivated me, either consciously or unconsciously, to continue to push my limits. For that high five, I’m grateful. ... View more

Originally posted on October 23, 2014. No matter how many babies I meet, I’m always left wondering what they want. Does a short squeak followed by a shrill squeal signal that the baby is hungry? That I left the dog outside by accident again? Or is the baby simply testing out her developing vocal chords? Driven by confusion and frustration, I might insert a pacifier into the baby’s mouth. The baby seems soothed, and I can take a breather. But according to one recent study, pacifiers disrupt our ability to understand a baby’s emotional state. Adult participants viewed pictures of happy and distressed babies. Sometimes the babies wore pacifiers and others times they didn’t. When the baby wore a pacifier, adults showed less intense facial reactivity and also rated the baby’s emotions as less intense. It didn’t matter whether the babies were happy or sad. The pacifiers numbed adults to baby facial expressions. Why did this happen? The idea hinges on the belief that we automatically mimic others’ emotional expressions. When I see people smile, I naturally mimic them because it helps me understand them and show empathy. Mimicking others is a great way to make friends. It lets others know we’re on the same team. Those who feel starved of social connection are the most likely to mimic others. Pacifiers are mimic roadblocks. With a gadget covering your face, I can’t make out what you’re feeling. As a result, I mimic you less, empathize with you less, and ultimately judge your experience as less intense than it really is. I don’t have a strong opinion about pacifiers. My sisters used them with their children, my parents used them with me, and I might use them when I have my own children. Like any consumer of knowledge, I’ll use this science to inform the choices I make. One thing is certain: I’ll never look at a pacifier in the same way. ... View more

Originally posted on February 5, 2015. Even though the smartphone has only been around for the past seven or eight years, it’s sometimes difficult to remember what life was like before we had so much information at our fingertips. You could argue with a friend about what year “Back to the Future, Part 2” came out, or in what year the “future” was set. (It was released in 1989. The future, filled with flying cars and floating skateboards, was set in 2015.) Back then, you couldn’t resolve discussions by swiping a screen and touching a button. Siri wasn’t even a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye. If you got lost, you had to consult a map or stop and ask for directions, and if you got bored while waiting in line, you couldn’t pass the time by playing Candy Crush or perusing Instagram. Luddites argue that life was better before the smart phone, whereas others tout the benefits of instant communication and information. But one thing is certain: The smartphone has changed our lives. And our thumbs. Yes, when we spend time on smartphones using a touchscreen, it changes the way our thumbs and brains work together, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Our obsession with smartphones presented the perfect opportunity to explore the everyday plasticity of our brains. With smartphones, we are using our fingertips—especially our thumbs—in a new way, and we do it a lot. And because our phones keep track of how we use them, they carry a wealth of information that can be studied. In the study, the research team used electroencephalography (EEG) to record brain response to the touch of the thumb, index finger, and middle fingerprints of touchscreen phone users compared to people who still use flip phones or other old-school devices. They found that the electrical activity in the brains of smartphone users was enhanced when all three fingertips were touched. The amount of activity in the brain’s cortex associated with the thumb and index fingertips was directly proportional to the amount of phone use. Repetitive movements over the touchscreen surface might reshape sensory processing from the hand. Cortical sensory processing in our brains is constantly shaped by personal digital technology. So, the next time you use your thumbs to tweet, answer email, or jot yourself a note, remember that you’re training your brain. Keep in mind, too, that excessive phone usage is linked with motor dysfunction and pain. Remember the so-called “BlackBerry thumb”? ... View more

Originally posted on May 6, 2014. At the 2012 International Congress of Psychology meeting in Cape Town, I enjoyed a wonderful talk by Elizabeth Loftus, which offered a terrific demo of how memory works.  Loftus showed us a handful of individual faces that we were later to identify, as if in a police line-up.  Later, she showed us some pairs of faces, one seen earlier and one not, and asked us which one we had seen.  In the midst of these, she slipped in a pair of faces that included two new faces, one of which was rather like an earlier seen face.  Most of us understandably but wrongly identified this face as previously seen.  To climax the demonstration, when she showed us the originally seen face and the previously chosen wrong face, most of us (me, too) picked the wrong face!  As a result of our memory reconsolidation, we—an audience of psychologists who should have known better—had replaced the original memory with a false memory. ... View more

Originally posted on May 21, 2014. A New York Times report on “the extreme sport” of remembering confirms what psychology instructors have long taught:  the power of mnemonic aids, especially organized images, to enable memory performance.  We humans are really good at retaining visual images, and we’re much better at later reproducing visualizable words (bicycle) than abstract words (process).  Thus it can help, when remembering a short grocery list, to use the peg-word system, with numerically ordered items—bun, shoe, tree, door, etc.—and to hang the grocery items on those images. Likewise, reports the Times article, all the competitors in a recent world memory contest used a “memory palace,” by associating to-be-remembered numbers, words, or cards with well-learned places, such as the rooms of a childhood home.  Challengers who claim to have invented an alternative method inevitably “come in last, or close to it,” noted one world-class competitor. Memory researchers who study these memorists report that they are, as you might expect, smart.  But they also have unusual capacities for focused attention and holding information in working memory. Yet, like you and me successfully forgetting previous locations of our car in the parking lot, they also need to be able to replace their place-item associations with new items. In this they are unlike students, who, if they are to become educated persons, need to retain information for months and years to come.  And for that there is no easy substitute for other well-researched memory aids, such as spaced practice, active rehearsal, and the memory consolidation that comes with a solid night’s sleep. ... View more

Originally posted on February 10, 2015. After falsely reporting being grounded by rocket fire while on a military helicopter in Iraq, and subsequently having his reported experiences during Hurricane Katrina challenged, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams has been grounded by pundit fire. Williams apologized, saying he misremembered the Iraqi incident. Talk shows and social media doubted anyone could misremember so dramatically, labeling him “Lyin’ Brian,” and grafting Pinocchio’s nose onto his face. It’s possible that Williams is, indeed, a self-aggrandizing liar (meaning he knowingly and intentionally told untruths). But to those who know the dramatic results of research into sincere but false memories by Elizabeth Loftus and others, it’s also believable that, over time, Williams constructed a false memory...and that Hillary Clinton did the same when misreporting landing under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996. Most people view memories as video replays. Actually, when we retrieve memories, we reweave them. We often then replace our prior memory with a modified memory—a phenomenon that researchers call “reconsolidation.” In the reconsolidation process, as more than 200 experiments have shown, misinformation can sneak into our recall. Even imagined events may later be recalled as actual experiences. In one new experiment, people were prompted to imagine and repeatedly visualize two events from their past—one a false event that involved committing a crime in their adolescence. Later, 70 percent reported a detailed false memory of having committed the crime!  False memories, like fake diamonds, seem so real. Is Brian lyin’? Does he have Pinocchio’s nose for the news? Perhaps—though telling blatant untruths surely is not a recipe for enduring success and prestige in his profession. Or might he instead be offering us a fresh example of the striking malleability of human memory? P.S. The morning after I submitted these reflections for posting, the New York Times offered this excellent (and kindred-spirited) application of false memory research to the Williams episode . ... View more

Originally posted on March 4, 2015. When was the last time you studied without distractions? Or did any one activity without simultaneously doing another? Multitasking pops up everywhere. While we work, we check our phones for messages, tweet our thoughts, listen to music, and update our Facebook status. At least that’s what my students tell me they do in their other classes. You may think listening to music while you prep for a big test helps you relax so you can concentrate and study. I used to think so. In college, I’d sit down with my textbooks, pop in my headphones, and turn on my favorite music to set the mood for studying.  Then I’d spend hours going over the material—and play my make-believe drums or air guitar! Yes, I studied alone in college. A lot. Listening to music may help college-aged students stay focused, but one new study found that older adults had more trouble remembering information they had learned while music was played in the background. The study challenged younger and older adults to listen to music while trying to remember names. For the older adults, silence was golden. But when the researchers made the older adults listen to music while they tried to remember the names, their memory lapsed. College-aged participants’ performance did not suffer regardless of whether they listened to music while memorizing names. Before you turn up the tunes to study, consider your age first. If you’re a younger college student, keep pressing play. Older students might be better off studying in silence. Regardless of our age, we might do well by taking a few minutes each day to set aside distractions, slow down, and become mindful of our thoughts, feelings, and environment.  ... View more

Originally posted on May 1, 2015. One of the striking discoveries of psychological science is the malleability of memory, as illustrated by the “misinformation effect.”  Experiments by Elizabeth Loftus and others exposed participants to false information. Afterwards, they misremembered a stop sign as a yield sign, a screw driver as a hammer, a peanut can as a Coke can, and a clean-shaven man as having a mustache. Even just imagining nonexistent happenings can create false memories—of being sickened by rotten eggs, having one’s finger caught in a mousetrap, of encountering Bugs Bunny (a Warner character) at Disneyland, or even of preschool child abuse. For me the most stunning finding is the most recent.  After collecting background information from university students’ parents, researchers Julie Shaw and Stephen Porter prompted the students to recall two events from their past—one a false early adolescent event, embedded in true details of the students’ life, such as the name of a friend.  For some, this nonexistent event involved committing a crime, such as a theft, assault, or even assault with a weapon.  After three interviews, 70 percent of students reported false (and usually detailed) memories of having committed a crime. The bottom line: Our memories are not just replays of our past experiences.  Rather, we actively construct our memories at the time of recall.  And that fact of life has implications for criminal interrogation, eyewitness recollections, and even memories retrieved during psychotherapy. ... View more

Originally posted on August 26, 2015. Imagine yourself on a Toronto to Lisbon flight. Five hours after takeoff and with open seas beneath you, your pilots become aware of fuel loss (a fractured fuel line is leaking a gallon per second). Declaring an emergency, the pilots divert toward an air base in the Azores. But while still 135 miles out, one engine dies of fuel starvation, and then, still some 75 miles out, the other. Moreover, your aircraft has lost its main hydraulic power, which operates the flaps. In eerie silence, and with nothing but water beneath, you are instructed to put on a life jacket and, when hearing the countdown to ocean impact, to assume a brace position. Periodically the pilot announces “[X] minutes to impact.” With the ocean’s surface approaching, you keep thinking, “I’m going to die.” Lisa Noble Photography/ Moment Open/ Getty Images But good news: when the engines went silent, you were still 33,000 feet in the air, and your captain is an experienced glider pilot. And the bad news: You are losing some 2000 feet per minute. After minutes of descent, the pilot declares above the passenger screams and prayers, “About to go into the water.” Then, “We have a runway! We have a runway!. . . Brace! Brace! Brace!” Nineteen minutes after losing all engine and primary electrical power and after a series of violent turns, the plane reaches the air base, making a damaging hard landing. You and 305 other passengers and crew members have escaped death. Your pilots return home as heroes. And your flight becomes the subject of television dramas. For psychologist Margaret McKinnon, now at McMaster University and St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton, this traumatic flight was not imaginary. It was the real August 24, 2001 Air Transat Flight 236, and she, as a honeymoon passenger, was among those thinking “I’m going to die.” Seizing this one-time opportunity to test people’s memory for details of a recorded traumatic event, McKinnon and her Baycrest Health Sciences colleagues Brian Levine and Daniela Palombo tracked down 15 of her fellow passengers. In a recent Clinical Psychological Science​ article, she reports that seven met criteria for PTSD, and that all of them, some four years later, exhibited vivid, “robust” memories of the details of their experiences. In a follow-up study, also appearing in Clinical Psychological Science​, eight of the passengers underwent fMRI scans while recalling the trauma. Their “enhanced” amygdala activation suggested that the amygdala may, via its links to the hippocampus and visual cortical areas, help create such emotion-fixed memories. The persistent memories from Flight AT236 confirm what other researchers have found—that it’s much easier to forget neutral events (yesterday’s parking place) than emotional experiences, especially extreme emotional experiences. After observing a loved one’s murder, being terrorized by a hijacker or rapist, or losing one’s home in a natural disaster, one may wish to forget. But such traumas are typically etched on the mind as persistent, haunting memories—for survivors of Nazi death camps, “Horror sear[ed] memory.” With many forms of trauma comes not repression but, more often, “robust” memory. Note:  Don’t let this essay leave you thinking that commercial flying is dangerous.  From 2009 to 2011, Americans were—mile for mile—170 times more likely to die in a vehicle accident than on a scheduled flight. In 2011, 21,221 people died in U.S. car or light truck accidents, while zero (as in 2010 and as on AT236) died on scheduled airline flights. When flying, the most dangerous part of the trip is your drive to the airport. ... View more

Originally posted on February 2, 2016. You’ve likely heard the NPR ads for brain fitness games offered by Lumosity. “70 Million brain trainers in 182 countries challenge their brains with Lumosity,” declares its website. The hoped-for results range from enhanced cognitive powers to increased school and work performance to decreased late-life cognitive decline or dementia. But do brain-training games really makes us smarter or enlarge our memory capacity? In our just-released Exploring Psychology, 10th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I suggest “that brain training can produce short-term gains, but mostly on the trained tasks and not for cognitive ability in general.” As an earlier TalkPsych blog essay reported, Zachary Hambrick and Randall Engle have “published studies and research reviews that question the popular idea that brain-training games enhance older adults’ intelligence and memory. Despite the claims of companies marketing brain exercises, brain training appears to produce gains only on the trained tasks (without generalizing to other tasks).” And that is also the recently announced conclusion of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), when fining Lumosity’s maker, Lumos Labs, $2 million for false advertising. As FTC spokesperson Michelle Rusk reported to Science​, “The most that they have shown is that with enough practice you get better on these games, or on similar cognitive tasks...There’s no evidence that training transfers to any real-world setting.” Although this leaves open the possibility that certain other brain-training programs might have cognitive benefits, the settlement affirms skeptics who doubt that brain games have broad cognitive benefits. ... View more

Contributed by Mark Gluck, author of Learning and Memory. Featuring Dr. Andrew Peter Mallon, CEO and Director of Research, Calista Therapeutics, and contributed by innovative teachers. Currently, my primary interest in connection with Learning and Memory is the discovery and development of new treatments that cure the diseases of learning and memory, either by protecting or regenerating damaged CNS cells, in diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, or by enhancing the capacity of the CNS to learn, in diseases like autism. Previously, I taught Learning and Memory for many years, whilst an Assistant Professor (Adj) at Brown University. In my view, the best lessons that can be taught are those that fundamentally inform students about the nature of their own psychology and how it works for and against them without their awareness. My two favorite classroom exercises explore two critical aspects of learning: conditioning and learned helplessness. In my classroom exercise on conditioning, I paired the ingestion of a very sweet, sugary substance (US) that elicits salivation (UR) with a distinctive sound (CS). I have used various sounds as the CS, including a dog-training clicker or saying ”test time” in my inimitable Scottish accent. The pairing can be performed during a normal lecture, and conditioning can quickly be established. Then, after the sugar is removed, the retention and extinction rate of the salivation response (CR) can be assessed in individuals. The association can be extinguished by pairing wasabi with the CS, but in the absence of intentional extinction, I have found that the CS–CR association can last weeks. For me, the real-life lesson from this observation is that it is equally possible to establish an association between a pleasant stimulus and a person: If you (CS) want to be liked by another person, you can pair your presence or your interaction with them with an agreeable US, such as a nice smile, eye contact, humor, friendliness, a compliment, or a bunch of flowers, chocolate, or other small gift. It is a reliable way to enhance one’s interactions with other people and can be remarkably effective. I used the standard impossible anagram experiment to induce learned helplessness in half of my class as a rapid way of demonstrating the power of that pathological psychological effect; however, I follow it up with a discussion that helps students differentiate pathological learned helplessness from the necessary realization that in some cases failure is inevitable. Learned helplessness is widely considered to be an important element of depression, and it is critical for students to understand it and to learn techniques to halt the downward cycles into learned helplessness that can stymie the treatment of depression. It is also important to distinguish between pathological learned helplessness, in which the person submits to failure in an achievable endeavor, and the reasonable recognition that some goals truly are unachievable. In the example I cite to demonstrate learned helplessness, a male student asks a young lady to the prom, is refused, asks another and is again refused, and becomes despondent and never asks another. I contrast that with the example of jumping off tall buildings while flapping one’s arms in the hope of flying, an endeavor in which one should submit to failure. The key to truly understanding learned helplessness lies in distinguishing what is really possible from what is impossible. ... View more

Written and contributed by Mark Gluck, author of Learning and Memory. Addicted to Love? Thinking about the object of his desire, Sam’s heart starts to pound, his palms get sweaty, and he feels excitement and anticipation. Denied access, he becomes irritable, has trouble sleeping, and develops an overwhelming obsession that swamps all other interests. Based on the above description, Sam might be a cocaine addict. Or he might just be passionately in love. Humans viewing pictures of their beloved show increased brain activity in areas including the dorsal striatum, the VTA/SNc, and the orbitofrontal cortex (Aron et al., 2005; Xu et al., 2010). These are some of the same brain areas activated by addictive drugs such as cocaine and amphetamine, and they are different from the brain areas activated by sexual arousal, indicating that romantic love is more than just a drive to obtain sex (Fisher, Aron, & Brown, 2005). Viewing pictures of a romantic partner can even produce pain relief, apparently by activating reward centers in the brain that overrule the simultaneous processing of pain (Younger, Aron, Parke, Chatterjee, & Mackey, 2010). If romantic love activates the same reward circuits as cocaine, can it be just as addictive? Individuals experiencing intense romantic infatuation can display behaviors reminiscent of drug seeking: pursuit of the beloved to the exclusion of other activities, obsessive and intrusive thoughts, and even impulsiveness and poor decision making—leading, for example, to crimes of passion (Frascella, Potenza, Brown, & Childress, 2010). On the other hand, just because romantic love shares some brain circuitry with cocaine and can elicit some of the same behaviors doesn’t necessarily justify calling love an “addictive substance.” Not everything that elicits reward-seeking behavior or that provokes withdrawal symptoms qualifies for that label. (You seek out water when you’re thirsty, and you experience distress if you go too long without; yet would you consider yourself “addicted” to water?) Many experts believe that the depression and grief that accompany a breakup are a normal part of life— not evidence of an addictive disorder. Nonetheless, some individuals do display excessive devotion to their beloved and experience severe withdrawal symptoms after romantic rejection, including clinical depression and (in rare cases) suicide or homicide. It is possible that, just as some individuals can try cocaine and walk away while others become pathologically addicted, so too some individuals can survive a painful breakup while others remain trapped in a state of loss. Debate continues regarding whether such individuals should be diagnosed with a pathological addiction (Reynaud, Karila, Blecha, & Benyamina, 2010). As research elucidates the brain substrates of drug addiction and suggests therapies (including medication) to reduce the cravings associated with drug withdrawal, should we consider using the same medications to help reduce cravings following romantic rejection? If you’ve ever had your heart broken by a failed romance, would you have taken advantage of such a treatment if it existed? ... View more

Written and contributed by Mark Gluck, author of Learning and Memory. It has long been assumed that sleep, beyond its role in rest and refreshment, also has a facilitating effect on learning and memory. After all, who doesn’t recognize the experience of working fruitlessly on a problem to the point of exhaustion, and then coming up with a sudden solution following a night of sleep? It is only over the last two decades that the effect of sleep on cognition has been studied in depth by the scientific community. This research has led to a growing understanding of how sleep affects learning and memory. A typical night of sleep includes cycles of alternating sleep stages, each characterized by a different profile of brain activity. In one of these stages, rapid-eye-movement (REM), or paradoxical, sleep,  the brain seems as active as when awake. This is the stage in which most dreams appear. Another stage, slow-wave sleep (SWS), or deep sleep, is characterized by highly synchronized brain-neuron activity and is the stage in which it is most difficult to wake the sleeper up. Recent research has combined sophisticated experimental designs, neuroimaging, and single-cell recordings to discover the relative impacts of the different sleep stages on various cognitive functions. It shows that SWS is mostly important for the consolidation of declarative memory, as well as for rule learning, spatial navigation, and insight. REM sleep, on the other hand, exerts its greatest effect on procedural memory. Some of the mechanisms by which sleep contributes to these functions are also becoming clear. During SWS, the hippocampus, a brain region involved in episodic and associative learning, ”replays” some of the waking experiences acquired during the previous day. The replay allows the new memories to be reorganized into a more efficient structure and also contributes to their assimilation into the general knowledge store of the individual. This reorganization is reflected as better performance the following day. Many questions are still unanswered. For example, the mechanism by which REM sleep facilitates learning and memory remains somewhat less characterized in comparison to that of SWS. However, the rapid advancements in this field hold out promise that the years to come will bring a fuller account of why the third of our lives we spend sleeping, a seemingly wasteful behavior from a learning–memory perspective,  is in fact not wasted at all. FURTHER READING Stickgold, R., & Walker, M. P. (2005). Memory consolidation and reconsolidation: What is the role of sleep? Trends in Neuroscience, 28, 408–415. Diekelmann, S., & Born, J. (2010). The memory function of sleep. Nature Review Neuroscience, 11, 114–126. ... View more

When I first started teaching, not as a grad student, but as real live instructor out on my own, I was 24 years old. I was a part-time instructor at a community college near Kansas City. Thinking I had to look the part, I bought some new clothes -- khakis and button-down shirts. It probably didn’t take me more than a couple weeks to realize that wasn’t going to work for me. Most of the students in my classes were older than I was, some by a full generation or two. And a lot of them were scared. They had never been in a college class before, but life circumstances gave them an opportunity – or forced them – to be here. A lot was riding on their being able to do well. Trying to project some sort of authority didn’t mesh with how I walked in the world, and, frankly, I didn’t think it would help my students. Instead, I decided to go where they were. I traded in my new khakis for new jeans. And over time the button-down shirts were gradually replaced by t-shirts. My overarching philosophy to teaching psychology boiled down to this: I know the theory and the research, and you have the life experience; let’s merge them together and see what we can learn from each other. Long ago I moved on to full-time teaching, currently up here in the Pacific Northwest, and I finally caught up to and then surpassed the average age of my students. Even though I’m now older and my students are now younger, I know that many of them are still afraid. I want to lighten the mood. Over the last 15 years, I have amassed a t-shirt collection suitable for Intro Psych. Frankly, I don’t know if wearing these t-shirts in class makes me more approachable. I do know that it’s common for students to look forward to seeing the day’s shirt. And if the connection to the material isn’t immediately obvious, they are on the edge of their seats waiting for the connection to become clear. Okay, maybe no one is quite on the edge of their seats, but I have heard audible “Oh!”s after explaining the relevance of the shirt. Besides, knowing what I’m going to wear on most every class day -- my classes meet on Mondays and Wednesdays -- eliminates having to decide what to wear. I typically wear a denim shirt or a light fleece over top, and then reveal the shirt when it’s relevant to what I’m discussing. This post will feature nine shirts. Next week will feature an additional ten. [Read that post here.] First day -- It's in the syllabus I debated about getting this one. I was concerned it would sound snarkier than I meant it to be. Snarkiness is not the tone I’m after upon meeting my students for the first time. I carefully frame it by asking, by a show of hands, for whom is this their first college term. I explain that I remember by first college term. As I went from class to class, the professors were all talking about the syllabus – a word I had never heard before. Finally I figured out they were referring to these pieces of paper they were handing out.  “Any time you have questions about anything related to the course, the answer is probably in the syllabus.” Completely anecdotally, when I wear the shirt on the first day, I seem to get many fewer questions about the course later on. Biopsych – Serotonin and the Dopamines: The Happiness Tour In Intro, I don’t spend oodles of time on neurons, but this shirt is a handy reminder of the role neurotransmitters play in our everyday lives. Besides, what better way to remember that serotonin and dopamine influence feelings of happiness? Biopsych - Brain Sometimes, when teaching, it helps to have an extra brain. Memory – Les Déspicables I admit that when I first saw this one, it cracked me up so much I just wanted it. And then I figured out where to fit it into Intro. I use it in the memory chapter when talking about retrieval cues. The image retrieves both memories of Les Misérables and minions from the Despicable Me movies. The juxtaposition of such different memories makes this funny. Thinking – Penguin experiencing insight  When you have wings, you think you should be able to use them to fly. And this young penguin flaps and flaps, all to no avail. And then with what is apparently a flash of insight given the presence of the lightbulb in panel 8, the penguin dons a jetpack. Easy peasy. Operant or classical conditioning – Exercise: Some Motivation Required I love this shirt for both operant and classical conditioning. For operant conditioning, the behavior is running. The t-rex is being positively reinforced (running faster gets t-rex closer to a tasty morsel), and the person is being negatively reinforced (running faster gets the person further away from the t-rex).  For classical conditioning, being chased is the unconditioned stimulus and fear is the unconditioned response. Seeing a t-rex in the future would be the conditioned stimulus, and fear at seeing the t-rex is the conditioned response. Stress or classical conditioning – Godzilla destroying city If Godzilla destroys your city, you will likely experience stress. For classical conditioning, Godzilla destroying your city would be the unconditioned stimulus and fear would be the unconditioned response. Seeing Godzilla in the future would be the conditioned stimulus and fear at seeing Godzilla would be the conditioned response. Stress or operant conditioning – Procrastination… just one more game For stress, this is a nice example of emotion focused coping. As long as you are playing the game, you can avoid thinking about all the homework you need to do. For operant conditioning, game play is one big variable ratio schedule of reinforcement. You never know when you’re going to win, but the more you play, the faster you’ll get to that next win. Attention – Car Talk inattentive driving [Currently on clearance. Not available much longer.] When covering attention, the back of this shirt nicely illustrates how we really can’t do two things at once. ... View more