Posts tagged psychology
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
How a movie changed one man’s vision forever
Bruce Bridgeman lived with a flat view of the world, until a trip to the cinema unexpectedly rewired his brain to see the world in 3D. The question is how it happened.
On 16 February 2012, Bridgeman went to the theatre with his wife to see Martin Scorsese’s 3D family adventure. Like everyone else, he paid a surcharge for a pair of glasses, despite thinking they would be a complete waste of money. Bridgeman, a 67-year-old neuroscientist at the University of California in Santa Cruz, grew up nearly stereoblind, that is, without true perception of depth. “When we’d go out and people would look up and start discussing some bird in the tree, I would still be looking for the bird when they were finished,” he says. “For everybody else, the bird jumped out. But to me, it was just part of the background.”
All that changed when the lights went down and the previews finished. Almost as soon as he began to watch the film, the characters leapt from the screen in a way he had never experienced. “It was just literally like a whole new dimension of sight. Exciting,” says Bridgeman.
But this wasn’t just movie magic. When he stepped out of the cinema, the world looked different. For the first time, Bridgeman saw a lamppost standing out from the background. Trees, cars and people looked more alive and more vivid than ever. And, remarkably, he’s seen the world in 3D ever since that day. “Riding to work on my bike, I look into a forest beside the road and see a riot of depth, every tree standing out from all the others,” he says. Something had happened. Some part of his brain had awakened.
Conventional wisdom says that what happened to Bridgeman is impossible. Like many of the 5-10% of the population living with stereoblindness, he was resigned to seeing a world without depth. What Bridgeman experienced in the theatre has been observed in clinics previously – the most famous case being Sue Barry, or “Stereo Sue”, who according to the author and neurologist Oliver Sacks first experienced stereovision while she was undergoing vision therapy. Her visual epiphany came during the course of professional therapy in her late-forties. The question is why after several decades of living in a flat, two-dimensional world did Bridgeman’s brain spontaneously begin to process 3D images?
(Credit: swsmh)
Learning disabilities affect up to 10 percent of children
Up to 10 per cent of the population are affected by specific learning disabilities (SLDs), such as dyslexia, dyscalculia and autism, translating to 2 or 3 pupils in every classroom according to a new study.
The study – by academics at UCL and Goldsmiths - also indicates that children are frequently affected by more than one learning disability.
The research, published in Science, helps to clarify the underlying causes of learning disabilities and the best way to tailor individual teaching and learning for affected individuals and education professionals.
Specific learning disabilities arise from atypical brain development with complicated genetic and environmental causes, causing such conditions as dyslexia, dyscalculia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorder and specific language impairment.
While these conditions in isolation already provide a challenge for educators, an additional problem is that specific learning disabilities also co-occur for more often that would be expected. As, for example, in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, 33 to 45 per cent also suffer from dyslexia and 11 per cent from dyscalculia.
Lead author Professor Brian Butterworth (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) said: “We now know that there are many disorders of neurological development that can give rise to learning disabilities, even in children of normal or even high intelligence, and that crucially these disabilities can also co-occur far more often that you’d expect based on their prevalence.
"We are also finally beginning to find effective ways to help learners with one or more SLDs, and although the majority of learners can usually adapt to the one-size-fits-all approach of whole class teaching, those with SLDs will need specialised support tailored to their unique combination of disabilities."
As part of the study, Professor Butterworth and Dr Yulia Kovas (Goldsmiths) have summarised what is currently known about SLD’s neural and genetic basis to help clarify what is causing these disabilities to develop, helping to improve teaching for individual learners, and also training for school psychologists, clinicians and teachers.
What the team hope is that by developing an understanding of how individual differences in brain development interact with formal education, and also adapting learning pathways to individual needs, those with specific learning disabilities will produce more tailored education for such learners.
Professor Butterworth said: “Each child has a unique cognitive and genetic profile, and the educational system should be able to monitor and adapt to the learner’s current repertoire of skills and knowledge.
"A promising approach involves the development of technology-enhanced learning applications – such as games - that are capable of adapting to individual needs for each of the basic disciplines."
(Source: eurekalert.org)
New research reveals how elephants ‘see’ the world
Think Elephants International, a not-for-profit organization that strives to promote elephant conservation through scientific research, education programming and international collaborations, today announced its latest study, “Visual Cues Given by Humans are Not Sufficient for Asian Elephants (Elephas Maximus) to Find Hidden Food.”
This study has been published in the April 17, 2013 issue of PLOS ONE, an international publication that reports original research from all disciplines within science and medicine. Designed in collaboration with and co-authored by 12-14 year old students from East Side Middle School in NYC, the study revealed that elephants were not able to recognize visual cues provided by humans, although they were more responsive to vocal commands. These findings may directly impact protocols for future efforts to conserve elephants, which are in danger of extinction in this century due to increased poaching and human/elephant conflict.
The publication of this paper is the climax of a three-year endeavor to create a comprehensive middle school curriculum that brings elephants into classrooms as a way to educate young people about conservation by getting them directly involved in work with endangered species. This research tested whether elephants could follow visual, social cues (pointing and gazing) to find food hidden in one of two buckets. The elephants failed at this task, but were able to follow vocal commands telling them which bucket contained the food. These results suggest that elephants may navigate their physical world in ways that primates and dogs, prior subjects of animal cognition studies, do not.
"Dogs have a great sense of smell, but appear to be able to follow human pointing as a way of finding food," said Joshua Plotnik, PhD, founder and CEO of Think Elephants. "Perhaps elephants’ sense of smell is one of their primary sensory modalities, meaning that they may use it preferentially when navigating their physical worlds."
In the field of animal cognition, there has been considerable attention focused on how animals interact with each other and humans. Particularly, there is a lot of interest in how dogs are able to read social cues to understand what people see, know or want. Remarkably, non-human primates such as chimpanzees are not good at this, suggesting it may be that through domestication or long-term human contact, dogs have developed a capacity for following social cues provided by people. Think Elephants aimed to test elephants on this because they are a wild, non-domesticated species that, in captivity in Thailand, are in relatively constant contact with humans.
The study’s findings have important implications for future protection protocols for wild elephants.
According to Dr. Plotnik, “If elephants are not primarily using sight to navigate their natural environment, human-elephant conflict mitigation techniques must consider what elephants’ main sensory modalities are and how elephants think so that they might be attracted or deterred effectively as a situation requires. The loss of natural habitat, poaching for ivory, and human-elephant conflict are serious threats to the sustainability of elephants in the wild. Put simply, we will be without elephants, and many other species in the wild, in less than 50 years if the world does not act.”
To mitigate this, Dr. Plotnik suggests further attention to research on elephant behavior and an increase in educational programming are needed, particularly in Asia where the market for ivory is so strong. Think Elephants’ education program in NYC is a pilot that will be expanding to Thai schools later in 2013.
The students were integrally involved in the development of this study, even helping to design some of the experimental control conditions. The study was carried out at Think Elephants’ field site in northern Thailand, and students participated via webcam conversation and direct web-links to the elephant camp.
This shows that collaborations that include both academics and young students can be productive, informative and exciting.
According to Jen Pokorny, PhD, Think Elephants’ head of education programs, “We are so proud of our pilot program with East Side Middle School and hope to use this as a model for other schools throughout the state and country. This wonderful group of students had an opportunity that very few young people have and, as a result, are now published co-authors on a significant piece of animal behavior research. They were integrally involved in the development of the study, even helping to design some of the experimental control conditions. Think Elephants is committed to showcasing these productive, informative and exciting student collaborations, and we believe similar studies can help to change the way in which young people observe and appreciate their global environment.”
Negative Thoughts Can Be Contagious
The way the people around us respond to stressful events — whether those people react negatively or positively — may be contagious when we are in the midst of a major life transition, a new study says.
What’s more, the increased risk of depression that comes with negative thinking also seems to rub off during these times, the study found.
For the study, researchers looked at 103 pairs of college-freshmen roommates’ “cognitive vulnerability,” which is the tendency to think that negative events are a reflection of a person’s own deficiency or that they will lead to more negative events. Those with high cognitive vulnerability are at an increased risk of depression, studies have found.
"We found that participants’ level of cognitive vulnerability was significantly influenced by their roommates’ level of cognitive vulnerability, and vice versa," the researchers wrote. All roommates in the study were selected randomly; students did not choose their roommates. Only three months of living together was needed for this contagiousness to be seen.
The researchers also found that those who experienced an increase in cognitive vulnerability during the first three months of college had nearly twice the level of depressive symptoms at six months, compared with those who did not experience an increase in cognitive vulnerability, according to the study. The effect was particularly strong when participants were under high-stress conditions.
Prior to this study, it was thought that cognitive vulnerability didn’t change much once a person passed early adolescence. However, the new findings suggest that during big transitions in life — when a person is continually exposed to a new social situation — cognitive vulnerability can be altered, the researchers said.
They noted that genetic, biological and environmental factors all likely play a role in a person’s level of cognitive vulnerability.
Further research is needed to determine whether cognitive vulnerability may change over time, the researchers said, noting that college freshmen are in a unique social environment.
"Our findings are consistent with a growing number of studies that have found that many psychological and biological factors previously thought to be set in stone by adulthood continue to be malleable,” the researchers said.
The study was published online April 16 in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.
Can Virtual Reality Treat Addiction?
Researchers are plugging in smokers, alcoholics, and even crack addicts to expose them to a relapse environment—and teach them how to deal with it. Will it work?
When the addicts enter the room, they haven’t met the people inside. They’ve never been there before, but the setting is familiar, and so is the pipe on the table, or the bottles of booze on the ground. Soon enough, someone’s offering them a hit, or a drug deal’s going down right in front of them.
They’ve been trying to get better—that’s why they’re doing this—but now they have cravings.
It’s about then that a voice instructs them to put down the joystick and look around the room without speaking, “allowing that drug craving to come and go like a wave.” The voice asks them periodically to rate their cravings as, after a couple minutes, they start to relax. The craving starts to dissipate and they hear a series of tones: beep-boop-boop.
It’s all being orchestrated by a wizard behind the virtual curtain: Zach Rosenthal, an assistant professor at Duke. For years now, with funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Department of Defense, Rosenthal has been running virtual reality trials like this with drug addicts in North Carolina (and veterans, hence the DOD funding) who are trying to recover. About 90 people, passing in and out of the NIDA study, have been coming to Rosenthal for treatment through virtual reality. They’re hooked up to a virtual reality simulator and dumped somewhere (a neighborhood, a crack house) where the researchers can slowly add cues to the environment, or change the environment itself, altering the situation to based on each patient’s history and adding paraphernalia (drugs, a crack pipe) as necessary.
The idea is that people will develop coping strategies, then take those strategies back to the real world. With coping mechanisms in their tool kits, users will get better, faster. But just because someone says no in a fake world, does that mean he’ll say no in real life?
Learned helplessness in flies and the roots of depression
When faced with impossible circumstances beyond their control, animals, including humans, often hunker down as they develop sleep or eating disorders, ulcers, and other physical manifestations of depression. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 18 show that the same kind of thing happens to flies.
The study is a step toward understanding the biological basis for depression and presents a new way for testing antidepressant drugs, the researchers say. The discovery of such symptoms in an insect shows that the roots of depression are very deep indeed.
"Depressions are so devastating because they go back to such a basic property of behavior," says Martin Heisenberg of the Rudolf Virchow Center in Würzburg, Germany.
Heisenberg says that the idea for the study came out of a lengthy discussion with a colleague about how to ask whether flies can feel fear. Franco Bertolucci, a coauthor on the study, had found that flies can rapidly learn to suppress innate behaviors, a phenomenon that is part of learned helplessness.
The researchers now show that flies experiencing uncomfortable levels of heat will walk to escape it. But if the flies realize that the heat is beyond their control and can’t be avoided, they will stop responding, walking more slowly and taking longer and more frequent rests, as if they were “depressed.”
Intriguingly, female flies slow down more under those stressful circumstances than males do. It’s not clear exactly what that means, but Heisenberg explains, “if we realize that the fly trapped in a strange, dark box, unable to get rid of the dangerous heat pulses, has to find a compromise between saving energy and not missing any chance of escape, we can understand that such a compromise may come out differently for males and females, as their resources and goals in life are different.”
Heisenberg’s team now intends to explore other questions, such as: How long does the flies’ depression-like state last? How does it affect other behaviors, like courtship and aggression? What is happening in their brain? And more.
Heisenberg says that the findings are a reminder of a lesson that children’s books are often best at showing: “Animals have lots in common with us humans. They breathe the same air, share many of the same resources, actively explore space, and have distinct social roles. Their brains serve the same purpose, too: they help them to do the right thing.”
Video games: bad or good for your memory?
After the horrific shooting sprees at Columbine High School in 1999 and Virginia Tech in 2007, players of violent video games, such as First Person Shooter (FPS) games, have often been accused in the media of being impulsive, antisocial, or aggressive.
Positive effects
However, the question is: do First Person Shooter games also have positive effects for our mental processes? At the University of Leiden, we investigated whether gaming could be a fast and easy way to improve your memory.
Develop an adaptive mindset
Indeed, the new generations of FPS (compared to strategic) games are not just about pressing a button at the right moment but require the players to develop an adaptive mindset to rapidly react and monitor fast moving visual and auditory stimuli.
Gamers compared to non-gamers
In a study published in Psychological Research Journal, Dr. Lorenza Colzato and her fellow researchers compared, on a task related to working memory, people who played at least five hours weekly with people who never played video games.
More flexible brain
The researchers found that gamers outperformed non-gamers. They suggest that video game experience trains your brain to become more flexible in the updating and monitoring of new information enhancing the memory capacity of the gamers.
Autistic Children’s Love For Video Games Could Lead To New Treatment Options
Kids and teenagers suffering from autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are more likely to use television and video games and less likely to spend time on social media than their normally-developing counterparts, claims new research set for publication in a future issue of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Micah Mazurek, an assistant professor of health psychology and a clinical child psychologist at the University of Missouri, recruited 202 children and adolescents with ASD and 179 of their typically developing siblings for the study.
Those with ASD spent more time playing video games and watching TV than spending time on physical or pro-social activities (including spending time on websites like Facebook or Twitter). The opposite was also true: typically-developing children spent more time on non-screen-related activities than they did watching shows or playing on the PS3 or the Xbox 360, according to the soon-to-be-published study.
“Many parents and clinicians have noticed that children with ASD are fascinated with technology, and the results of our recent studies certainly support this idea,” Mazurek said in a statement. “We found that children with ASD spent much more time playing video games than typically developing children, and they are much more likely to develop problematic or addictive patterns of video game play.”
In a separate study of 169 boys with ASD, excessive video game use had been linked to oppositional behaviors, such as refusal to follow directions or getting into arguments with others. Mazurek said that the issues will need to be further examined in future, closely-controlled research.
“Because these studies were cross-sectional, it is not clear if there is a causal relationship between video game use and problem behaviors,” she said. “Children with ASD may be attracted to video games because they can be rewarding, visually engaging and do not require face-to-face communication or social interaction. Parents need to be aware that, although video games are especially reinforcing for children with ASD, children with ASD may have problems disengaging from these games.”
Despite those issues, Mazurek also believes that autistic children’s love for video games and television could be used for beneficial purposes. The professor believes that discovering what makes these screen-related pastimes so attractive to kids with ASD could help researchers and medical experts develop new treatment options.
“Using screen-based technologies, communication and social skills could be taught and reinforced right away,” Mazurek explained. “However, more research is needed to determine whether the skills children with ASD might learn in virtual reality environments would translate into actual social interactions.”
Men are traditionally thought to have more problems in understanding women compared to understanding other men, though evidence supporting this assumption remains sparse. Recently, it has been shown, however, that meńs problems in recognizing women’s emotions could be linked to difficulties in extracting the relevant information from the eye region, which remain one of the richest sources of social information for the attribution of mental states to others. To determine possible differences in the neural correlates underlying emotion recognition from female, as compared to male eyes, a modified version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test in combination with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was applied to a sample of 22 participants. We found that men actually had twice as many problems in recognizing emotions from female as compared to male eyes, and that these problems were particularly associated with a lack of activation in limbic regions of the brain (including the hippocampus and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex). Moreover, men revealed heightened activation of the right amygdala to male stimuli regardless of condition (sex vs. emotion recognition). Thus, our findings highlight the function of the amygdala in the affective component of theory of mind (ToM) and in empathy, and provide further evidence that men are substantially less able to infer mental states expressed by women, which may be accompanied by sex-specific differences in amygdala activity.
Anxious about life? Tylenol may do the trick
University of British Columbia researchers have found a new potential use for the over-the-counter pain drug Tylenol. Typically known to relieve physical pain, the study suggests the drug may also reduce the psychological effects of fear and anxiety over the human condition, or existential dread.
Published in the Association for Psychological Science journal Psychological Science, the study advances our understanding of how the human brain processes different kinds of pain.
“Pain exists in many forms, including the distress that people feel when exposed to thoughts of existential uncertainty and death,” says lead author Daniel Randles, UBC Dept. of Psychology. “Our study suggests these anxieties may be processed as ‘pain’ by the brain – but Tylenol seems to inhibit the signal telling the brain that something is wrong.”
The study builds on recent American research that found acetaminophen – the generic form of Tylenol – can successfully reduce the non-physical pain of being ostracized from friends. The UBC team sought to determine whether the drug had similar effects on other unpleasant experiences – in this case, existential dread.
In the study, participants took acetaminophen or a placebo while performing tasks designed to evoke this kind of anxiety – including writing about death or watching a surreal David Lynch video – and then assign fines to different types of crimes, including public rioting and prostitution.
Compared to a placebo group, the researchers found the people taking acetaminophen were significantly more lenient in judging the acts of the criminals and rioters – and better able to cope with troubling ideas. The results suggest that participants’ existential suffering was “treated” by the headache drug.
“That a drug used primarily to alleviate headaches may also numb people to the worry of thoughts of their deaths, or to the uneasiness of watching a surrealist film – is a surprising and very interesting finding,” says Randles, a PhD candidate who authored the study with Prof. Steve Heine and Nathan Santos.
While the findings suggest that acetaminophen can help to reduce anxiety, the researchers caution that further research – and clinical trials – must occur before acetaminophen should be considered a safe or effective treatment for anxiety.
(Source: publicaffairs.ubc.ca)