Ever dreamt of climbing to the roof of the world? Visions of standing atop Everest? I recommend reading Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. It will test your commitment to the dream. In Krakauer’s tragically relevant first-hand account of the 1996 disaster on Everest, in which 8 people perished in a blizzard, he discusses at length the games altitude plays with the mind at very high elevations. Krakauer suggests, as many have, that the cause of the high mortality rates during the blizzard that afflicted their expedition were in part due to the madness induced by altitude. With the recent tragedy on the same peak, in which 16 high-altitude workers died in an avalanche, we are reminded of the many dangers of climbing the world’s highest peaks.
Just as calling the Spelling Bee a sport seems to degrade the term sport, calling Mountaineering a sport degrades Mountaineering in its own way.
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Have you ever tried to keep up with your day by switching between all the things you have to do? Of course you have. Multi-tasking and even just trying to focus our attention on one out of the million stimuli in the modern world are just part of everyone’s lives. The system that makes this possible is called working memory. Working memory is what takes in all the stimuli of the environment, organizes it, attends to it, and decides whether to rehearse or try to remember the information or whether it simply should be thrown away and forgotten.
Working memory is made up of 4 main parts. First off there are the two “slave systems.” These are the visuo-spatial sketchpad and the phonological loop. These are basic holding areas for incoming stimuli, the visuo-spatial sketchpad holds visual information such as maps, while the phonological loop deals with stimuli such as read words, numbers, or auditory stimuli. These segments simply take in the information, it is up to the other systems to choose what happens to that raw input. Read more…
Most people know that there are extreme cognitive deficits associated with DAT, otherwise known as Alzheimer ’s disease, but what is the nature of these struggles? What do those with DAT have the most trouble on, and what is the biggest cause of the troubles? It turns out that those with DAT have the biggest deficits in attentional tasks, and a lot of their memory issues stem from an inability to focus and maintain attention. In 1998 “Sentence Comprehension Deficits in Alzheimer’s Disease: A Comparison of Off-Line VS. On-Line Sentence Processing” looked at and tried to analyze the reasons behind memory deficits in DAT individuals.
The experimenters wanted to test whether the problems were stemming from a lack of syntactic knowledge, or the knowledge of how words form into sentences correctly, or from a working memory deficit. Working memory is the system that holds information in short term memory, deciding whether to attend to it, rehearse it, and transfer it into long term memory or to just throw it out. The better a person’s working memory, the better they can learn and pay attention to what they are looking at. Read more…
Once a year, family and friends get together for a day full of camaraderie, nachos, wings, and beer, and some football. If you guessed that I am talking about the Super Bowl, you are correct. But, if you’re like me, it’s not the atmosphere or the football of this occasion that I look forward to most, it is the commercials. In fact, according to multiple sources, I am not the only one who feels this way about the Super Bowl. What studies have shown is that over half of the viewers watch the game for the commercials rather than the game itself. Read more…
Say you’re home for the summer and decide to take a walk downtown. What are you doing as your walk? Where is your attention? Is it on the people who are waiting to cross the street or the ones who just stopped in front of a store window? Perhaps it’s on the little one begging his parents for ice cream a few yards ahead of you or the shiny red convertible that is just passing by. Is your attention focused on what stores you are passing or are you watching where you are going?
What about when you’re studying for an exam in the library? Is your attention actually on your notes or is it really on your phone as you wait for a text? Have you really focused all of your attention on that o-chem problem or is part of you laughing at the antics of the group at the next table? Maybe part of your attention focused on the loud group just walking through the doors while another part is on your facebook page.
In everyday life there are so many things going on around you. There are so many things that you are aware of that you don’t even realize are taking your attention like what street you’re on or what color the storefront behind you is. Did you know that studies have actually shown that people in urbanized environments are less able to focus on a single task? Or that they are more likely to be processing everything that is going on around them instead of focusing on a single object?
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Have you ever had a moment in which your mother forgot where she had put her phone, which she says she was just using it a minute ago? Or have you ever walked out of a store empty handed because you couldn’t remember precisely what it was that you were going to buy? I have.
Such forgetting occurs more frequently among older adults (60 -78yrs old) than among younger adults (17 – 27yrs old). In other words, older adults forget more often than younger adults. In addition, older adults are also more easily distracted. For example, when my dad once turned on a television while my grandma and I had a conversation, grandma got distracted by the show on television. She then forgot that she was in a conversation just a moment ago and started watching the show with my dad. At moments like this, I could not stop wondering why can’t my grandmother just ignore the television like I do.
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As I walk down Main Street in St. Paul, Minnesota, I see so many people who I assume I will never see again. As I turn the corner and enter a coffee shop, I recognize a person that I had passed by. I recognize the distinct facial features of this supposed stranger more than the hundreds of faces I have seen today. Facial recognition is critical to our lives as social human beings. In fact, we can recognize a face quickly due to our ability to process faces holistically. Holistic processing is when we process the entire face instead of looking at each separate facial feature. So was it that person’s attractive face that made me recognize them? People are attracted to all different types of people, so does attraction influence facial recognition? Perhaps sexual orientation plays a role in a person’s ability to recognize someone. One would think that heterosexual men and women would recognize the opposite sex better since they are attracted to them, but would that be the same for lesbians and gays? Read more…
Ms. Barry’s short purple curls bounced whenever she yelled at me to pay attention. My elementary school years were filled with crayon and graphite tornadoes, spirals, and flowers in the margins of my math-boxes. However, when work got serious in fifth grade, Ms. Barry would take away my pencil when she felt that I was not paying attention.
Four years after my fifth grade graduation, Jackie Andrade of University of Plymouth, UK found that doodling while listening to dull material could actually help listeners pay attention (2009). In her experiment, the researchers asked participants who had just completed another experiment if they would stay to listen to an “answering machine recording” that listed names of people attending a birthday party. Half of the participants listening shaded in printed shapes. At the end of the study, the participants were asked to remember as many of the eight people coming to the party as they could. The participants that had not shaded shapes were able to remember on average about 5.8 out of the possible eight names. Those who had shaded shapes were able to remember about 7.5 out of the possible eight names. This means that those doodling were significantly better at remembering the names of who were coming to the party. Although the research did not measure boredom or daydreaming, the researcher believed doodling acted as a tool to prevent daydreaming, thereby allowing the participants to be more attentive to the material they were hearing.
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More and more children are being diagnosed with Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) across the United States every year. ADHD symptoms include problems paying attention, staying focused, controlling impulses, and uncontrollable hyperactivity (NIMH). There is much debate about whether this increase in diagnosis is because of an increase in occurrence of ADHD, or an increased need to pathologize childhood behavior in order to medicate. With this influx of ADHD diagnoses across the country, there are more ADHD students in schools across the country that are having significant problems learning and attending to different information. So, it is important that cognitive researchers look at the ways that ADHD affects the cognition and learning process of students so that school lessons can be more effectively taught!
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