I bet you remember as a kid being told by your parents to “eat your veggies, even the greens.” But I bet you don’t remember your parents telling THEIR parents to eat their veggies. The vast effects from eating vegetables and having a healthy diet in younger developmental stages are enumerable, but consequences of diet on elderly populations are often overlooked.
Figure 1. Vitamin K can be naturally found in several leafy green vegetables, as shown above.
What is in these magical green veggies (lettuce, kale, spinach) anyway? Amongst other things, a notable compound present is vitamin K. This vitamin is most notably used in the body to promote protective blood clotting. However, other potential roles of vitamin K in the brain have been examined in rats. Vitamin K is present in high levels in the brain, and proteins that rely on vitamin K to function are also found in the brain. These same studies found evidence for vitamin K to specifically have effects in the aging brain. Older rats that were fed a vitamin K rich diet had better spatial learning memory than those fed a low vitamin K diet. This phenomenon was only observed in older rats, not the younger populations. Read more…
By now you’ve probably searched your memory and are replaying the gruesome images you have vividly stored in your mind from that September morning over a decade ago. That day stands out in your memory and most likely will for the rest of your life. I was only nine years old that day, but even I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing that day… At least I think I can. I had just finished my second class of the day when an all-school assembly was called in the bunker-like cement building that is the German School of Washington, D.C. Faculty and staff were frantically pacing around our auditorium while older students sat holding each other, many weeping out of fear for family members and loved ones that worked a short 15 minute trip away in downtown D.C. Only after an over-head projector was flipped on was I able to understand the severity of the situation, and I clearly remember a feeling of shock and misunderstanding overcoming me. I recently discussed that terrifying day with my mom, who picked me up from school sometime after the North Tower in New York City was struck. After explaining to her what I remembered from that day she said to me, “that’s funny, I picked you up from school almost immediately after the first attack in New York.” What I recalled was sitting in that auditorium for what felt like an eternity, watching both the North and South Tower get hit, collapsing, and watching all the aftermath unfold from right there with my peers. In reality I was sitting safe and sound on my couch, watching the mayhem on TV back at home. Read more…
In the world of athletics, there has been a significant increase of awareness and concern around concussions. With contact sports, athletes are vulnerable to sports-related concussions of varying degrees. Athletic trainers are very sensitive when it comes to diagnosing a concussion, given that any injury to the brain is substantial and should not be overlooked. As an athlete myself, I have witnessed many teammates experience concussions, who have not been able to participate in any sort of physical activity. If concussions have such an impact on an individual’s athletics, one may suspect that such repercussions extend to other aspects of an individual’s life. This article further investigates the impact of sports-related head contacts on working memory capacity.
Working Memory refers to a short-term store that is relevant to the performance of a cognitive task in an activated state. Working memory is crucial to overall cognitive ability and requires a level of attention that ensures memory will be maintained in spite of interference or distractions. Working memory becomes important for an athlete’s optimal performance and physical safety because he or she must focus his/her attention on the game and likewise, maintain task relevant information during distracting events that happen on the field.
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Think back to your favorite food. Is it sweet? How sweet? Do you think that you could pick this prized food out of a lineup of nine different versions of this food of varying sweetness, texture, and aroma? Maybe you think you have a discerning palate that will assist your accuracy, despite the fact that you forgot to actually take note of these factors while eating. A recent study examines food memory and our accuracy at recalling certain sensory aspects of food that many of us take for granted when we eat. Findings suggest we may not remember all the aspects of our favorite food as accurately as we might presume.
Food memory is a complex area of study that psychologists still struggle to understand. There have been a variety of studies examining memory about certain aspects of foods. Researchers have examined foods ranging from orange juice to yogurt, and examined sensory aspects such as bitterness to thickness. These results have not all supported one clear way people remember aspects of food, as people report certain food descriptors more accurately than others depending on the food.
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Innocent Criminal: The Science behind Inaccurate Eye-witness Testimony
Ever noticed CSI shows? Every time a crime is committed, the potential perpetrator is told to stand behind a glass frame. Along with him or her are more people. What’s intriguing about all of this is that every single “false criminal” looks very similar to the original criminal. Whether it be the tattoos, the similar age, or maybe even the clothing, there is a sense of similarity across the spectrum. That similarity is done for a reason. Suspects who have distinctive features like a birthmark or scar were the easiest to identify in a line-up. To prevent any bias, all those in the lineup have similar features and physical stature to the perpetrator. While in theory this seems legitimate, in reality there are flaws. Previous research has shown that older adults show a decline in visual discrimination over time. Recollection of facts and events gets more difficult as people age, so older adults struggle to connect faces to distinctive features. This supports the idea that older adults with associative deficit hypothesis have a harder time identifying distinct features of a face when they are presented with other faces that look familiar.
Research has shown that eyewitness testimony is not a very accurate way to identify suspects who may have committed a crime; yet, eyewitness testimony is one of the most critical pieces of evidence that investigators use to build a case. New research is being done to figure out ways that law enforcement can help individuals who may have witnessed a crime, properly identify the perpetrator. Distinctive features such as moles or tattoos are things that help differentiate people. Witnesses rely heavily on these distinctive features when they are asked to identify a suspect.
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In many social situations, it is necessary to hide what you are feeling. Take, for example, that you hate your boss. Just because you hate him doesn’t mean you can openly express your feelings of dislike for him, because that would leave you, in all likelihood, jobless. In this situation, suppressing your emotional expressions is beneficial to you. Decreasing your outward expression of felt emotions is called emotion suppression. Many adults are very good at suppressing their emotions and do it frequently in their day-to-day lives in order to avoid controversy or in order to stay within social norms. Emotion suppression is beneficial for people in many social contexts, but does using emotion suppression have any other benefits besides its social advantages? Or are there any harmful effects that come with using emotion suppression?
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Do you remember that top hit from your favorite 90s boy band that you listened to on your CD player in 4th grade? Now can you recall that song on the radio that you listened to last week while driving to Colby College on I-95? Chances are, you will remember every last word of that pop song from a decade ago, but you cannot remember anything about that song you heard very recently while driving past endless pine trees. It may seem counter intuitive that certain songs from the distant past are ingrained in memory much better than the latest hits. However, past research has shown that memory and emotion are closely linked, and memory can be enhanced when correlated with powerful emotions (Laird et al., 1982). Music can be an effective catalyst in eliciting strong emotion, and people use music as a way to derive emotional responses. For example, people listen to upbeat and lively music when they want to socialize at parties, and movies play sad, slow music in a minor key during tragic moments. To examine whether emotion can have an effect on the ability to remember songs, Stephanie M. Stalinski and E. Gleen Schellenberg, investigated whether “liking” a song is correlated with the ability to remember it at a later point in time.
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I remember my cousin giving me tips on how to be left alone while riding the subway. “Wear a hooded sweatshirt that is too big for you,” Chris said, “and also wear headphones with music too loud, rap is always good. And put on a mean look, like you’re not someone to mess with; be unfriendly. No one wants to mess with me when I do that, they take one look at me and they stay away. It usually gets me a bench all to myself.” At first, hearing this surprised me. I couldn’t believe that people were that quick to judge others but I found myself thinking of all the times I had ridden on the bus or train. With one glance at someone I was able to make judgments on whether or not to sit near them. Chris’ description of how to keep people away fit my own judgment of who to stay clear of. That was when I first realized how much people rely on first impressions. Most times, our first impressions are based on the appearance of a person; their physical appearance. Our judgments are usually quick and automatic and don’t necessarily change until we interact with the other person more.
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Have you ever found yourself thinking about a future event, or pictured a specific incident in the future? Have you ever had a coach ask you to imagine making the perfect shot on goal or running the best race of your life? This type of thinking is called episodic future thinking, which is when your brain stops thinking about the present and instead moves into the world of a possible future. When we “pre-experience” the future, we can imagine ourselves in a specific setting with other people, performing certain actions. Thinking about the future is similar in some ways to re-experiencing the past. This is important, as the belief that a particular event could possibly occur in the future influences our behavior and decisions.
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Do you ever catch yourself thinking back to experiences from your past – happy, triumphant, gloomy memories? Perhaps, you sometimes imagine what life could present you down the road, where you’ll be 5, 10, 15 years down the line. Research into mental time travel (MTT) – the manner of mentally travelling back in time to relive past personal events or forward in time to imagine possible autobiographical events in the future, suggests that past and future MTT operate along similar principles, mostly in that people tend to recall events dated close to the present regardless of direction. However, differences have been observed as well; future events have been found to involve more of an observer perspective (as opposed to first-person) and refer less frequently to specific events, while they’re generally more personally important and relevant to the person’s self-identity. In other words, MTT into the future is based more upon the creation of potential circumstances in terms of one’s own personal representation of the world based on prior experiences, while MTT into the past is based on actual recollection of past events. The present study (Miles and Berntsen, 2011) aimed to further investigate future versus past MTT in response to different types of sensory cues. It focused on odor cues, as it has been claimed that odors are uniquely encoded and maintained in memory. Thus, it was expected that memories evoked in response to various smells should be different from those evoked via verbal or visual cues.
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