Sharing Fronto-parietal network supports context-dependent speech comprehension via BrowZine

Fronto-parietal network supports context-dependent speech comprehension
Smirnov, Dmitry; Glerean, Enrico; Lahnakoski, Juha M.; Salmi, Juha; Jääskeläinen, Iiro P.; Sams, Mikko; Nummenmaa, Lauri
Neuropsychologia, Vol. 63 – 2014: 293 - 303

10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.09.007

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Sharing Dyslexia: reconciling controversies within an integrative developmental perspective via BrowZine

Dyslexia: reconciling controversies within an integrative developmental perspective
Boets, Bart
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 18 Issue 10 – 2014: 501 - 503

10.1016/j.tics.2014.06.003

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Sharing Relations among fluid intelligence, sensory discrimination and working memory in middle to late childhood – A latent variable approach via BrowZine

Relations among fluid intelligence, sensory discrimination and working memory in middle to late childhood – A latent variable approach
Voelke, Annik E.; Troche, Stefan J.; Rammsayer, Thomas H.; Wagner, Felicitas L.; Roebers, Claudia M.
Cognitive Development, Vol. 32 – 2014: 58 - 73

10.1016/j.cogdev.2014.08.002

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The Controlled Chaos of Creativity | Beautiful Minds, Scientific American Blog Network

Excellent overview of contemporary research on creativity by Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2014/06/25/the-controlled-chaos-of-creativity/

ADHD: And even MORE evidence suggestive of a brain network connectivity disorder

And more evidence for ADHD as being related to poor brain network connectivity. (click here for more posts) Click on images to enlarge.






And, again, this extant research is consistent with the three-level hypothesized explanation of the impact of certain brain training programs on controlled attention (click here for special white paper as well as on-line PPT modules and keynote video presentation of this model).




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Article: Stanford scientists track the rise and fall of brain volume throughout life

Very interesting development.....lets call it white matter neuro-norms

Stanford scientists track the rise and fall of brain volume throughout life
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/september/brain-imaging-age-091614.html

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Article: GCHQ employs more than 100 dyslexic and dyspraxic spies

GCHQ employs more than 100 dyslexic and dyspraxic spies
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11111584/GCHQ-employs-more-than-100-dyslexic-and-dyspraxic-spies.html

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Article: DARPA Project Starts Building Human Memory Prosthetics

DARPA Project Starts Building Human Memory Prosthetics
http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/darpa-project-starts-building-human-memory-prosthetics

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Sharing A self-determination theory approach to predicting school achievement over time: the unique role of intrinsic motivation via BrowZine

A self-determination theory approach to predicting school achievement over time: the unique role of intrinsic motivation
Taylor, Geneviève; Jungert, Tomas; Mageau, Geneviève A.; Schattke, Kaspar; Dedic, Helena; Rosenfield, Steven; Koestner, Richard
Contemporary Educational Psychology, Vol. 39 Issue 4 – 2014: 342 - 358

10.1016/j.cedpsych.2014.08.002

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Article: Study: For cognitive training to work, it must induce neuroplasticity in brain regions that matter

Study: For cognitive training to work, it must induce neuroplasticity in brain regions that matter
http://sharpbrains.com/blog/2014/05/12/study-for-cognitive-training-to-work-it-must-induce-neuroplasticity-in-brain-networks-that-matter/

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Sharing Comparison of Credible Patients of Very Low Intelligence and Non-Credible Patients on Neurocognitive Performance Validity Indicators via BrowZine

Comparison of Credible Patients of Very Low Intelligence and Non-Credible Patients on Neurocognitive Performance Validity Indicators
Smith, Klayton; Boone, Kyle; Victor, Tara; Miora, Deborah; Cottingham, Maria; Ziegler, Elizabeth; Zeller, Michelle; Wright, Matthew
The Clinical Neuropsychologist, Vol. 28 Issue 6 – 2014: 1048 - 1070

10.1080/13854046.2014.931465

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Good intro overview article on exploratory factor analysis

This is a nice overview article of exploratory factor analysis. It includes a nice table of "rules of thumb" and an appendix with definitions and explanations of key concepts and terms. A good article for helping teach EFA to others. Click on image to enlarge



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The external/internal-directed cognition (EDC/IDC) framework

I just skimmed the article below. I like the way it uses the terms external/internal-directed (ECD/ICD) cognition framework to discuss the differences and relations between the activities of the default brain network and the executive control networks (click here for excellent article explaining these two networks)

Click on images to enlarge












I resonate to this EDC/IDC framework as it is relevant to my white paper on improving attentional control (via IM training--although the paper, IMHO, is more about how different brain training programs may work). That hypothesized model is in the figure above, and can be found at the MindHub.



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Article: A framework for understanding the relationship between externally and internally directed cognition

A framework for understanding the relationship between externally and internally directed cognition
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393214001729

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Improving focus: The "isolator" - a blast from the past

Focus and concentration has been of keen interest for many years. This is a real doozy.












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Article: Fronto-parietal network oscillations reveal relationship between working memory capacity and cogn...

Fronto-parietal network oscillations reveal relationship between working memory capacity and cogn...
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00761/abstract

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Quotes to note: The wandering tribes in assessment - Dr. Joel Schneider

Well stated by Dr. Joel Schneider

"The principles of assessment are like a set of unruly and loosely affiliated wandering tribes. There is no established hierarchy of rules, no “Prince of Principles,” and no royal family. There is no Senate, no Supreme Court, no United Nations. Yet, some members are esteemed by all. Others play partisan politics. Some are pompous windbags, others meek speakers of truth. Some are brilliant but impractical, others practical but limited. Some go unnoticed because they are subtle, others because they are so obvious. Some are widely misunderstood and some have outlived their usefulness. Some appear to be senselessly confining but actually protect us from our own excesses and foibles"

In:





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Psychologists have compared the mental abilities of Scrabble and crossword champions [feedly]

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Psychologists have compared the mental abilities of Scrabble and crossword champions
// BPS Research Digest

Completed Scrabble (left) and crossword grids (image from Toma et al 2014).

Every year, hundreds of word lovers arrive from across the US to compete in the American Crossword Puzzle tournament. They solve clues (e.g. "caught some Z's") and place the answers (e.g. "sleep") in a grid. Meanwhile, a separate group of wordsmiths gather regularly to compete at Scrabble, the game that involves forming words out of letter tiles and finding a suitable place for them on the board.

Both sets of players have exceptional abilities, but how exactly do they differ from each other and from non-players of matched academic ability? Some answers are provided by Michael Toma and his colleagues, who have performed the first detailed comparison of the mental skills of the most elite crossword and Scrabble players in the US. Previous studies on gaming expertise have mostly involved chess players, so this is a refreshing new research angle.

Toma's team recruited 26 elite Scrabble players (in the top two per cent of competitive players, on average; 20 men) and 31 elite crossword players (in the top 7 per cent, on average; 22 men) to complete several tests of working memory - the kind of memory that we use to juggle and use information over short time-scales.

For example, there was a visuospatial task that involved judging whether images were symmetrical, while also remembering highlighted locations in a series of grids that always appeared after each symmetry image. Another challenge was the reading span task (a test of verbal working memory), which involved judging the grammatical sense of sentences, while also remembering the order of individual letters that were flashed on-screen after each grammatical challenge.

The researchers anticipated that the Scrabble players would outperform the crossworders on visuospatial working memory, whereas they thought the crossword players might be superior on verbal working memory. These predictions were based on the contrasting skills demanded by the two games. Scrabble players often spend hours learning lists of words that are legal in the game, but unlike crossword players, they don't need to know their meaning. In fact many Scrabble players admit to not knowing the meaning of many of the words they play. On the other hand, Scrabble players need skills to rearrange letters and to find a place for their words on the board (a visuospatial skill), whereas crossword players do not need these skills so much because the grid is prearranged for them.

The researchers actually uncovered no group differences on any of the measures of visuospatial and verbal working memory. However, in line with predictions, the crossword competitors outperformed the Scrabble players on an analogies-based word task - identifying a pair of words that have the same relation to each other as a target pair - and the crossworders also had higher (self-reported) verbal SAT scores than the Scrabble players (SAT is a standardised school test used in the US). The two groups also differed drastically in the most important strategies they said they used during game play - for instance, mental flexibility was far more important for crossworders, whereas anagramming was important for Scrabble players but not mentioned by crossworders.

Both expert groups far outperformed a control group of high-achieving students on all measures of verbal and visuospatial working memory. This was despite the fact the students had similar verbal SAT levels to the expert players. So it seems the elite players of both games have highly superior working memory relative to controls, but this enhancement is not tailored to their different games.

Toma and his team said that by looking beyond chess and studying experts in cognitively demanding verbal games, their research "helps to build a more general understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie elite performance." From a theoretical perspective, their finding of no working memory differences between Scrabble and crossword competitors is supportive of a domain general account of working memory - the idea that there exists a single mechanism that supports the processing of verbal and visuospatial information.

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Toma, M., Halpern, D., & Berger, D. (2014). Cognitive Abilities of Elite Nationally Ranked SCRABBLE and Crossword Experts Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.3059

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain On Music : NPR Ed : NPR - More from Dr. Nina Kraus

More excellent information based on the work of Dr. Nina Kraus.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/09/10/343681493/this-is-your-brain-this-is-your-brain-on-music

Dr. Kraus's lab can be found here. http://www.soc.northwestern.edu/brainvolts/

Article: White matter matters in major depressive disorder (MDD). Researchers from Stanford University have been mapping white matter connections in the brain. A new study identifies the link between abnormal...

White matter matters in major depressive disorder (MDD). Researchers from Stanford University have been mapping white matter connections in the brain. A new study identifies the link between abnormal...
http://biomedcentral.tumblr.com/post/97214283041/white-matter-matters-in-major-depressive-disorder#_=_

More "white matter matters" info at Brain Clock blog - http://www.brainclock.net/search/label/white%20matter

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