******************************************************
Kevin McGrew, PhD
Educational Psychologist
Director, Institute for Applied Psychometrics
IAP
www.themindhub.com
******************************************************
From Neurociencia, a Flipboard magazine by igaea
Nobody really believes that the shape of our heads are a window into our personalities anymore. This idea, known as…
Neuroscientist Rogier Kievit discusses the neuroscience of intelligence.
From Twitter, a Flipboard magazine by Jon Lieff MD
Seemingly countless self-help books and seminars tell you to tap into the right side of your brain to stimulate creativity. But forget the…
Neuroplasticty is the way a brain makes lasting alterations of its own circuits when responding to experience. A vast array of mechanisms have been…
From Science and Health, a Flipboard magazine by IBTimes UK
In case of creative thinkers, researchers noted a better connection between 3 crucial parts of the brain.…
In recent years, Angela Duckworth's work around "grit" has been widely taken up in school reform circles as a way of thinking about building students "non-cognitive skills,"…
Journal ArticleDatabase: PsycARTICLES
The ubiquity of video games in today's society has led to significant interest in their impact on the brain and behavior and in the possibility of harnessing games for good. The present meta-analyses focus on one specific game genre that has been of particular interest to the scientific community—action video games, and cover the period 2000–2015. To assess the long-lasting impact of action video game play on various domains of cognition, we first consider cross-sectional studies that inform us about the cognitive profile of habitual action video game players, and document a positive average effect of about half a standard deviation (g = 0.55). We then turn to long-term intervention studies that inform us about the possibility of causally inducing changes in cognition via playing action video games, and show a smaller average effect of a third of a standard deviation (g = 0.34). Because only intervention studies using other commercially available video game genres as controls were included, this latter result highlights the fact that not all games equally impact cognition. Moderator analyses indicated that action video game play robustly enhances the domains of top-down attention and spatial cognition, with encouraging signs for perception. Publication bias remains, however, a threat with average effects in the published literature estimated to be 30% larger than in the full literature. As a result, we encourage the field to conduct larger cohort studies and more intervention studies, especially those with more than 30 hours of training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)
Journal ArticleDatabase: PsycARTICLES
The purpose of this study was to determine the relation between reading and working memory (WM) in the context of 3 major theories: the domain-specificity theory (debate) of WM, the intrinsic cognitive load theory, and the dual process theory. A meta-analysis of 197 studies with 2026 effect sizes found a significant moderate correlation between reading and WM, r = .29, 95% CI [.27, .31]. Moderation analyses indicated that after controlling for publication type, bilingual status, domains of WM, and grade level, the relation between WM and reading was not affected by types of reading. The effects of WM domains were associated with grade level: before 4th grade, different domains of WM were related to reading to a similar degree, whereas verbal WM showed the strongest relations with reading at or beyond 4th grade. Further, the effect of WM on reading comprehension was partialed out when decoding and vocabulary were controlled for. Taken together, the findings are generally compatible with aspects of the domain-specificity theory of WM and the dual process theory, but, importantly, add a developmental component that is not currently reflected in models of the relation between reading and WM. The findings suggest that the domain-general central executive of WM is implicated in early reading acquisition, and verbal WM is more strongly implicated in later reading performance as readers gain more experience with reading. The implications of these findings for reading instruction and WM training are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)
Richard Haier is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California Irvine and is the author of the Neuroscience of Intelligence…