Dr. Pos­ner will pro­vide an update on lat­est research and appli­ca­tions to develop brain net­works and self-control, at the upcom­ing 2012 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit (June 7-14th, 2012).

Michael Pos­ner is Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus at the Uni­ver­sity of Ore­gon and Adjunct Pro­fes­sor at the Weill Med­ical Col­lege in New York (Sack­ler Insti­tute). He is cur­rently engaged in a project with Mary K. Roth­bart to under­stand the devel­op­ment Read the rest of this entry »

Very inter­est­ing new study pub­lished in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence: Short-Term Music Train­ing Enhances Ver­bal Intel­li­gence and Exec­u­tive Func­tion.

Abstract: Researchers have designed train­ing meth­ods that can be used to improve men­tal health and to test the effi­cacy of edu­ca­tion pro­grams. How­ever, few stud­ies have demon­strated broad trans­fer from such train­ing to per­for­mance on untrained cog­ni­tive activ­i­ties. Here we report the effects of two inter­ac­tive com­put­er­ized train­ing pro­grams devel­oped for preschool chil­dren: one for music and one for visual art. After only 20 days of train­ing, Read the rest of this entry »

Work­ing mem­ory is our abil­ity to store and manip­u­late infor­ma­tion for a brief time. It is typ­i­cally mea­sured by dual-tasks, where the indi­vid­ual has to remem­ber an item while simul­ta­ne­ously pro­cess­ing a some­times unre­lated piece of infor­ma­tion. A widely used work­ing mem­ory task is the read­ing span task where the indi­vid­ual reads a sen­tence, ver­i­fies it, and then recalls the final word. Indi­vid­ual dif­fer­ences in work­ing mem­ory per­for­mance are closely related to a range of aca­d­e­mic skills such as read­ing, spelling, com­pre­hen­sion, and math­e­mat­ics. Cru­cially, there is emerg­ing research that work­ing mem­ory pre­dicts learn­ing out­comes inde­pen­dently of IQ. One expla­na­tion for the impor­tance of work­ing mem­ory in aca­d­e­mic attain­ment is that because it appears to be rel­a­tively unaf­fected by envi­ron­men­tal influ­ences, such as parental edu­ca­tional level and finan­cial back­ground, it mea­sures a student’s capac­ity to acquire knowl­edge rather than what they have already learned.

How­ever lit­tle is known about the con­se­quences of low work­ing mem­ory capac­ity per se, inde­pen­dent of other asso­ci­ated learn­ing dif­fi­cul­ties. In par­tic­u­lar, it is not known either what pro­por­tion of stu­dents with low work­ing mem­ory capac­i­ties has sig­nif­i­cant learn­ing dif­fi­cul­ties or what their behav­ioral char­ac­ter­is­tics are. The aim of a recent study pub­lished in Child Devel­op­ment (ref­er­ence below) was to pro­vide the first sys­tem­atic large-scale exam­i­na­tion of the cog­ni­tive and behav­ioral char­ac­ter­is­tics of school-aged stu­dents who have been iden­ti­fied solely on the basis of very low work­ing mem­ory scores.

In screen­ing of over 3000 school-aged stu­dents in main­stream schools, 1 in 10 was iden­ti­fied as hav­ing work­ing mem­ory dif­fi­cul­ties. There were sev­eral key find­ings regard­ing their cog­ni­tive skills. The first is that the major­ity of them per­formed below age-expected lev­els in read­ing and math­e­mat­ics. This sug­gests that Read the rest of this entry »

In yesterday’s inter­view with Michael Pos­ner, he says:

- “There is a grow­ing num­ber of stud­ies that show the impor­tance of inter­ac­tion between our genes and each of our envi­ron­ments. Epi­ge­net­ics is going to help us under­stand that ques­tion bet­ter, but let me share a very inter­est­ing piece of research from my lab where we found an unusual inter­ac­tion between genet­ics and parenting.”

- “Good par­ent­ing, as mea­sured by dif­fer­ent research-based scales, has been shown to build good effort­ful con­trol which, as we saw ear­lier, is so impor­tant. Now, what we found is that some spe­cific genes reduced, even elim­i­nated, the influ­ence of the qual­ity of par­ent­ing. In other words, some children’s devel­op­ment really depends on how their par­ents bring them up, whereas oth­ers do not — or do to a much smaller extent.”

Now check out this fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle in the Econ­o­mist:Domes­ti­ca­tion and intel­li­gence in dogs and wolves | Not so dumb animals

- “Monique Udell of the Uni­ver­sity of Florida … won­dered whether learn­ing rather than evo­lu­tion explained his obser­va­tions. Her team there­fore worked with a mix­ture of pet dogs, dogs from ani­mal shel­ters that had had min­i­mal inter­ac­tion with peo­ple, and wolves raised by humans.”

- “As they report in Ani­mal Behav­iour, the wolves out­per­formed both shel­ter dogs and pets. Indeed, Read the rest of this entry »

Michael I. Pos­ner is a promi­nent sci­en­tist in the field of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science. He is cur­rently an emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of neu­ro­science at the Uni­ver­sity of Ore­gon (Depart­ment of Psy­chol­ogy, Insti­tute of Cog­ni­tive and Deci­sion Sci­ences). In August 2008, the Inter­na­tional Union of Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence made him the first recip­i­ent of the Dogan Prize “in recog­ni­tion of a con­tri­bu­tion that rep­re­sents a major advance in psy­chol­ogy by a scholar or team of schol­ars of high inter­na­tional reputation.”

Dr. Pos­ner, many thanks for your time today. I really enjoyed the James Arthur Lec­ture mono­graph on Evo­lu­tion and Devel­op­ment of Self-Regulation that you deliv­ered last year. Could you pro­vide a sum­mary of the research you presented?

I would empha­size that we human beings can reg­u­late our thoughts, emo­tions, and actions to a greater degree than other pri­mates. For exam­ple, we can choose to pass up an imme­di­ate reward for a larger, delayed reward.

We can plan ahead, resist dis­trac­tions, be goal-oriented. These human char­ac­ter­is­tics appear to depend upon what we often call “self-regulation.” What is excit­ing these days is that progress in neu­roimag­ing and in genet­ics make it pos­si­ble to think about self-regulation in terms of spe­cific brain-based networks.

Can you explain what self-regulation is?

All par­ents have seen this in their kids. Par­ents can see the remark­able trans­for­ma­tion as their chil­dren develop the abil­ity to reg­u­late emo­tions and to per­sist with goals in the face of dis­trac­tions. That abil­ity is usu­ally labeled ‚ self-regulation.

The other main area of your research is atten­tion. Can you explain the brain-basis for what we usu­ally call “attention”?

I have been inter­ested in how the atten­tion sys­tem devel­ops in infancy and early childhood.

One of our major find­ings, thanks to neu­roimag­ing, is that there is not one sin­gle “atten­tion”, but three sep­a­rate func­tions of atten­tion with three sep­a­rate under­ly­ing brain net­works: alert­ing, ori­ent­ing, and exec­u­tive atten­tion. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we host a very stim­u­lat­ing essay on the impor­tance of problem-solving and encour­ag­ing com­plex game-playing for children’s com­plete “cog­ni­tive nutri­tion”. Enjoy!

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Children’s Com­plex Thinking

– By Tom O’Brien and Chris­tine Wallach

Pop over to your neigh­bor­hood school and visit some class­rooms. Is what’s hap­pen­ing cog­ni­tively nutri­tive? That is, does it sat­isfy present needs and pro­vide nour­ish­ment for the future health and devel­op­ment of children’s thinking?

Or is it puni­tive, with lit­tle con­cern for present nour­ish­ment and future health and development?

The Genevan psy­chol­o­gist and researcher Her­mina Sin­clair said, Read the rest of this entry »

We had a very fun ses­sion titled Teach­ing Brain Fit­ness in Your Com­mu­nity at an Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging (ASA) con­fer­ence for health pro­fes­sion­als a cou­ple of weeks ago. Full house, with over 60 atten­dants and very good par­tic­i­pa­tion, show­ing great inter­est in the topic. I can’t wait to see the evaluations.

These are some of the resources I promised as a follow-up, which can be use­ful to every­one inter­ested in our field:

Good gen­eral arti­cles in the busi­ness and gen­eral media:

Change or Die

Want a sharp mind for your golden years? Start now

You’re Wiser Now

On how new neu­rons are born and grow in the adult brain:

Salk Sci­en­tists Demon­strate For The First Time That Newly Born Brain Cells Are Func­tional In The Adult Brain

Old Brains, New Tricks

On the sur­pris­ing plas­tic­ity and devel­op­ment poten­tial through­out life:

Brain Plas­tic­ity, Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing and Reading

Jug­gling Jug­gles the Brain

Suc­cess­ful Aging of the Healthy Brain

Other impor­tant aspects:

Stress and the Brain

Exer­cise and the Brain

Humor, Laugh­ter and The Brain

On the impor­tance and impact of men­tal stim­u­la­tion and train­ing: Read the rest of this entry »