We live in a world today that is constantly bombarding us with stimuli. Even a simple morning routine of getting to school or work shows how much information we have presented to us. Say we turn on the TV to look at traffic reports; we will see which celebrity is promoting his or her new film, which route to take and the new product we absolutely need to have. We have to make breakfast and get ourselves ready to leave. On the way there, we could run into advertisements on billboards and a new song we like on the radio. By the time we finally arrive, so much has been stored away in our memory. Yet how many times has it happened that we distinctly remembering hearing a specific song on the radio or which person was on the news that morning and someone else confidently tells us we are mistaken? How can we so strongly and vividly remember something when it did not happen at all?
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Regular exercise is known to have many advantages. In addition to the obvious physical benefits such as reducing the risks of heart disease and obesity, it can also benefit the brain. Regular aerobic exercise releases endorphins, a naturally occurring opiate, to improve an athlete’s mood. It also increases cognitive function in healthy adults, including improved working memory and executive functioning (Guiney & Machado, 2013). Marathon running, however, is above and beyond typical regular aerobic exercise; it is considered the ultimate test of fitness. The marathon always concludes the Olympic games, seeming to symbolize the pinnacle of athleticism. But to complete a marathon, runners put their bodies through the ringer. They run more mileage than the human body was probably ever designed to run, all in preparation for the 26.2-mile race. Though regular exercise has positive effects on both the body and the mind, could running a marathon actually be too much exercise? Beyond sore muscles, marathon runners often experience tendonitis, torn muscles and ligaments, sprains, stress fractures, shin splints, and other injuries. But might there also be negative cognitive effects of running a marathon?
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I wish I could have taken a picture of every student’s face that walked into Mr. B’s middle school history class on Friday morning. It was always a struggle to get up on Fridays because I knew that my first class of the day always meant it was time for a quiz. All of my peers despised Mr. B for his quizzes to make sure that we had been paying attention all week and that we were keeping up with the information. “Isn’t that what tests are for? Why do we have to take a quiz every week?”
Being tested frequently is something that students are most of the time not too fond of, but in the long run when you get the grade of your exam, you will thank the teachers that made you recall and tested you on the information learned every week! Recent research in cognitive psychology has provided strong evidence to support this notion.
Retrieval, the process by which information can be extracted from memory, is treated as an evaluative tool that reveals what people remember and what they have forgotten; retrieval shows what people know but it also changes what people know. From an educational perspective, it is important to understand that retrieval serves more than just the purpose of reinforcing memory of a tested fact! Cognitive psychologists have recently been seeking to provide educators with clear, effective advice on how to improve student learning.
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Learning names is a challenge for most of us, and we all occasionally have that one person we just can’t quite remember. But is there a pattern who we remember and who we don’t? If you belong to a minority, as I do, there’s probably been at least one time when you’ve probably been frustrated and offended because people seem to always confuse you with the few other members of your race. For example, I was one of the only two Asian girls in my high school. This inevitably led to teachers calling me Jane half the time, and Cathy the other half. But should we be offended? Or is there actual legitimacy behind this unintentional racism? The cross-race effect in memory is the idea that humans are actually better at remembering faces that are the same race as them, relative to other races. Hourihan, Fraundorf, and Benjamin further analyzed this effect in their 2013 study on how cross-race effect relates to face memory.
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Do you ever listen to music while doing your homework? I know I do! In my opinion my iTunes library helps me stay on task and finish my work in a more timely manner. If you feel the same way I do, you should know that studies have shown that the effects of background music varying depending on the type of work you are doing; in some cases music can help you while in other situations you’re better off putting the headphones down.
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Anyone who listens to country music will undoubtedly know and love Kenny Chesney’s song “I Go Back,” in which he sings about certain songs that remind him of different memories throughout his life. He croons about how “Jack and Diane” brings back vivid memories of his adolescence such as football and his first love, and how “Keep on Rockin Me Baby,” reminds him of trying to impress girls at bars in college. When listening to this song, you can’t help but think of your own songs that have “somehow stamped your life.” Maybe every time you hear that NSYNC song, you’re brought back to awkward middle school dances. Maybe “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” makes you smile at memories of your first boyfriend. Maybe, like Chesney, a country song brings you back to your summer high school days. In fact, for me, “I Go Back” itself brings back vivid memories of driving through back roads in a Jeep with my friends. One thing is for certain: songs have a significant power to bring back life memories. This leads us to wonder: What types of memories exactly do they bring back?
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Imagine that you could taste sounds. If you were lucky, your name would be delicious—every time someone said it you might taste that one fruit smoothie you love or a fresh-baked cookie. Each word would be like sampling a new flavor, for better or worse. This is a form of synesthesia, a condition in which one sense activates a separate sense. Color-grapheme synesthesia seems more believable to most people. Due to this condition, about 5% of the world’s population sees numbers and letters as inherently colored, even if they are printed in black. This can actually improve performance on some tasks, such as a visual search. The left half of the picture below shows the vision of a normal individual; the right half shows that of an individual with synesthesia. As you can see, it is much easier to find the 2’s for an individual with synesthesia.
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Growing up, I noticed that some children would leave the classroom with teachers I didn’t recognize, and until I grew a little older I didn’t understand where they were going. Eventually I learned that these children had learning disabilities, some of whom were diagnosed with dyslexia. What has never crossed my mind since then, is that there are still adults who are affected by reading disabilities. Experimenters Welcome, Chiarello, Halderman, and Leonard (2008) examined a group of college students who they called “Resilient Readers” who have a rare form of reading disability that can be thought of as similar to dyslexia. The stereotype that people with dyslexia just switch letters is only one small piece of the disorder, which is caused by the brain not properly recognizing or processing symbols (letters and words). There are other symptoms for those struggling with dyslexia, including difficulties in: figuring out meanings of sentences, recognizing written words, and rhyming. Though it can be difficult for a young student with dyslexia to learn how to read, if taught specialized techniques and approaches to learning they are able to overcome or at least learn to work with their disorder (PubMed Health). Many students with dyslexia attend higher education and excel among their classmates.
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In today’s digital world, advertising agencies are constantly trying to develop new campaign strategies for promoting a company’s product. The essential goal is to embed that product into consumers’ minds so that they will eventually buy the item. Due to successful advertising campaigns, we are all familiar with the Geico gecko and Flo from progressive (it is a love-hate relationship with Flo, to say the least). Consumer behavior relies on the buyers’ memory processes and the abilities of the buyers to remember the product they perceived via advertisements. In television advertisements, specifically, strategists and designers must consider several things when designing commercials presented between shows. Not only must strategists and designers successfully convey the details of their particular product, but companies must also keep their audience interested so that they will attend to the commercial. Without attending to the commercial, people will be less likely to remember the item shown on-screen.
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The milestone that stands out among teenagers’ exciting and memorable lives is getting one’s license. The excitement that comes with the accomplishment of a driver’s license dominates the high school years sending teens into a euphoric state of independence. Over time, and as licensed teens grow older, parents are likely to sit down with their kids to stress the importance of never getting behind the wheel of a car while under the influence of alcohol because of the dangers of drunk driving. Increasingly over the past few years parents have also recognized the importance of giving the same advice in regards to driving while talking on the phone. There is growing awareness of the need to outlaw cell phone use in the car, especially given the new texting and driving phenomenon (http://www.donttextdrive.com/), however drunk driving and cell phone driving are still not seen as comparable dangers.
Nearly everyone will talk on a cell phone while driving at some point during his or her life. Some people need to make urgent business calls, some people call a friend to ask for
directions, and some people just get bored on their drive home from work. David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, discusses in his research on distracted driving that approximately 8% of drivers on the road at any given time throughout the day are using their cell phone (Glassbrenner, 2005). A majority of drivers believe that phone calls don’t have a distracting effect on them especially if they are using a hands-free device. However, Strayer and his colleagues have found that the attention demanding nature of cell phone conversations make the damaging effects of distracted driving, hands-free device or not, present in nearly all drivers (e.g., Patten et al. 2004; Redelemeier & Tibshirani, 1997; Strayer & Johnston, 2001), save some appropriately named “supertaskers” (Watson & Strayer, 2010) who showed no impairment while talking and driving.
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