What can cab drivers tell us about Alzheimer's Disease? Quite a lot, it turns out. London Cabbies' Brains Analyzed for Alzheimer's Research https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/11/01/london-taxi-driver-alzheimers-research/ ... View more

Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation is promoting intentional acts of kindness this September (#BeKind21) with a goal toward better mental health for everyone. Every day, from September 1 to September 21, let’s engage in purposeful acts of kindness to others and ourselves. I encourage you and your students to sign up.   Zara Abrams (2021) provides a nice summary of the research on kindness, emphasizing its benefits to both our physical and mental health. Even small acts, such as bringing a colleague coffee, counts. Buying me a beer also counts. Without too much difficulty, we can tie acts of kindness into what students are learning in their Intro Psych course. Here are a few examples. Biopsych chapter: Which neurotransmitters are most likely to be released in our brains when we do good deeds for others? Explain Development chapter: What are developmentally-appropriate good deeds we could perform for each group: toddlers, middle-schoolers, high-schoolers, middle-aged adults, older adults? Explain. Learning chapter: Identify at least three acts of kindness you have engaged in. Was your act positively reinforced? Explain. Memory chapter: We tend to have stronger memories for events that are emotional. Based on the emotional reaction of those who were on the receiving end of your kindness, will any of your acts of kindness be remembered years from now by one of your recipients? After September 21st, give your students an opportunity to reflect on their experience. What was especially good about engaging in intentional acts of kindness? Were there any surprises? Will they continue to be intentionally kind?   References Abrams, Z. (2021, August). The case for kindness. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/news/apa/kindness-mental-health ... View more

In Intro Psych, the sense of smell typically takes a distant backseat to vision and hearing. Part of that short shrift is due to the comparatively sparse research into our sense of smell and smell’s close relative, taste. With temporary loss of smell being one of the common symptoms of Covid-19, thousands of people have gained a new appreciation for this often-taken-for-granted sense. (See this blog post for more information--Covid-19 and a loss of smell: Discussion topic.) During your coverage of the memory chapter, ask your students to consider common odors associated with food: freshly baked cookies or bread, curry, fish, kimchi, etc. Or the smell of the cologne or perfume worn by a loved one. Or the smell of cigarette smoke. Do any of these odors invoke strong memories?  In a small-group—synchronous or asynchronous—discussion, ask your students to share the odor and any associated memories they are comfortable sharing. When you bring students back together as a class, ask the following question using your favorite polling tool: How strong was your memory? Very strong Somewhat strong Neither strong nor weak Somewhat weak Very weak I didn’t have a memory This tendency for odors or tastes to act as retrieval cues for strong autobiographical memories is known as the Proust phenomenon or Proust effect, named for Marcel Proust. In the first book of his 7-book tour-de-force, In Search of Lost Time (also sometimes titled, Remembrance of Things Past), Proust writes of how a madeleine—a buttery cookie—dipped in tea evoked a powerful childhood memory. A recent fMRI study (Zhou et al., 2021) found a strong connection between our sense of smell and our hippocampus—a connection that is much stronger than that for touch, hearing, or vision. The researchers posit that while the pathways for touch, hearing, and vision were all rerouted—over the course of our evolution—to the cerebral cortex before heading back to the hippocampus, that did not happen for smell. Our sense of smell has maintained its direct connection to the hippocampus—the brain structure most associated with the creation of new memories.   Reference Zhou, G., Olofsson, J. K., Koubeissi, M. Z., Menelaou, G., Rosenow, J., Schuele, S. U., Xu, P., Voss, J. L., Lane, G., & Zelano, C. (2021). Human hippocampal connectivity is stronger in olfaction than other sensory systems. Progress in Neurobiology, February. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pneurobio.2021.102027     ... View more

Learning how to learn assignment My father used to get so frustrated with one of my brothers. My father would say, with great exasperation, “I talk to you until I’m blue in the face…” Even though my father’s “talk” was—apparently—not very effective, it didn’t keep him from talking. Over and over again. Until he was blue in the face. How many of us instructors are like my father? We tell our students about the best study strategies until we are blue in the face, and it feels like most of our students continue to use less effective methods. Maybe we should take a different approach. Carolyn R. Brown-Kramer (2021) asked her Intro Psych students to read one of four research articles where each article investigated the effectiveness of a study strategy. Two articles were about more effective study strategies: distributed practice (Seabrook et al., 2005) and practice testing (McDaniel et al., 2011). Two articles were about less effective study strategies: rereading (Rawson & Kintsch, 2005) and forming mental images (Schmeck et al., 2014). Students were instructed to “write a three- to four-page paper summarizing and analyzing [their assigned article] critically” and then “drawing specific connections to how they study, how they could use the article’s results to improve their studying behavior, and their plans to adopt (or not to adopt) the strategy about which they had read.” (Contact Brown-Kramer for assignment instructions and scoring rubric.) What impact did this assignment have on students? Over the course of the term, students reported using more of the more effective strategies and fewer of the less effective strategies. Students who read the practice testing article (McDaniel et al., 2011) did much better on the exams following this assignment than students who read the other three articles. Students who were given this assignment did better on the exams following this assignment and in the course overall than students from an earlier term who were not given this assignment. Students who reported using the more effective study strategies and using them more frequently did better on the exams and in the course overall. Brown-Kramer (2021) has provided us with some pretty compelling evidence that there is something we can do as instructors that will help students change their study strategies. I wonder what component of this assignment is key. For example, would the application piece be enough, or is the analytic section crucial? Or perhaps the analytic section ensures that students are reading the article carefully. In that case, would some other assignment instructions that would also ensure careful reading—such as answering a few targeted questions about different sections of the article—be just as effective? Brown-Kramer’s assignment would fit as part of your coverage of research methods or memory. If you use it as part of your memory coverage, the research methods review would be a terrific application of distributive practice.   References Brown-Kramer, C. R. (2021). Improving students’ study habits and course performance with a “learning how to learn” assignment. Teaching of Psychology, 48(1), 48–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628320959926 McDaniel, M. A., Agarwal, P. K., Huelser, B. J., McDermott, K. B., & Roediger, H. L. (2011). Test-enhanced learning in a middle school science classroom: The effects of quiz frequency and placement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(2), 399–414. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021782 Rawson, K. A., & Kintsch, W. (2005). Rereading effects depend on time of test. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97(1), 70–80. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.97.1.70 Schmeck, A., Mayer, R. E., Opfermann, M., Pfeiffer, V., & Leutner, D. (2014). Drawing pictures during learning from scientific text: Testing the generative drawing effect and the prognostic drawing effect. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 39(4), 275–286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2014.07.003 Seabrook, R., Brown, G. D. A., & Solity, J. E. (2005). Distributed and massed practice: From laboratory to classroom. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19(1), 107–122. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1066   ... View more

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

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