Everyone has moments in their life that they wish they could forget. It could be that time that you the bridge gave out during your pictures on the water or the inevitable newspaper article written about it. But what if you could forget the whole thing happened and block out that embarrassing moment out of your memory forever?
Subida! Subida! Climb! Like Dora in the children’s television show Dora the Explorer, approximately 20% of the American population speaks more than one language fluently. (Grosjean, 2012) They are able to watch Spanish soap operas without subtitles, read the Harry Potter series in German, and ultimately pass along the language to their children. In schools across the country, students are learning a second language every day in the classroom to become bilingual.
You probably know of the person. This person constantly makes poor life decisions despite the negative consequences, like driving while drunk or getting high before class. This person does not have great organizational and planning abilities, maybe he or she blows off important events in order to drink or do drugs. He or she can’t delay the pleasure of getting high or drunk until later, and instead needs immediate gratification from the drug. This person thinks he or she can cram an entire semester’s worth of studying into a few hours, or shows up to a movie set high and expects to preform perfectly. Is the person you’re thinking of dependent on alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, or some other drug?
Substance-dependent and an addict, but not everyone is both!
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…
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!
If you have ever taken an introductory level class in Psychology, chances are you learned about the Stroop task. For those of you who haven’t, try this activity out for yourself; look at the list of words written below. Simply name the color ink the word is written in. It sounds easy enough, but is actually much harder than you might think.
RED, BLUE, BLACK, ORANGE, PINK, GREEN
BLUE, ORANGE, GREEN, RED, PINK, BLACK
Undoubtedly you were able to read the first line with ease, but the second line, well that was a different story. Chances are you find yourself inclined to read the word initially and then must pause to actually say the color ink instead. This task can be frustrating! Why is it so hard? Why is the bottom row where color words are written in their inconsistent ink so much harder do than the top row where words are in consistent ink color?
Recent Comments