I've not been able to write much this past month, so what should be a habit turned out to be impossible for a while, but I will try to keep you posted for at least the monthly news about education, psychology, sociology and so on...
How we form habits, change existing ones
"Studies show that about 40 percent of people's daily activities are performed each day in almost the same situations. Habits emerge through associative learning. "We find patterns of behavior that allow us to reach goals. We repeat what works, and when actions are repeated in a stable context, we form associations between cues and response," Wendy Wood explains in her session at the American Psychological Association's 122nd Annual Convention."This short essay by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology explaines how habits are formed in our minds, why we need them, and how we might be able to change or get new ones.
Stronger early reading skills predict higher intelligence later
"A new study of identical twins has found that early reading skill might positively affect later intellectual abilities. The study, in the journal Child Development, was conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and King's College London."In this study they have tested reading skills and intelligence of twins repeatedly in different ages. With this, they've seen a link between good early reading skills and later higher intelligence.
New insights into how young and developing readers make sense of words
This news is about a study made by the University of Leicester."The study found that while developing young readers and skilled adult readers had similar difficulty correctly recognising anagrams that can form another word by switching the order of only the inside letters, both age groups found it equally easy to recognise anagrams when the outside letters also had to be switched around to form another word.
This is because the brain has difficulty keeping track of the position of inside letters when recognising words but assigns special importance to the outside letters."
"The findings are important for understanding the role of letter position in children’s word recognition, including in dyslexia."
Part of brain stays as active in old age as it was in youth
"At least one part of the human brain may be able to process information the same way in older age as it does in the prime of life, according to new research conducted at the University of Adelaide.""Both younger (aged 18-38 years) and older (55-95 years) adults had the same responses for spatial attention tasks involving touch, sight or sound."
This study shows, that while some cognitive and reaction times are slowed down during the aging process, other types of awareness, e.g. spatial attention tasks are staying more agile even in an old age.
Stress during pregnancy can be passed down through generations, rat study shows
"To better understand problems during pregnancies today, we should look to the experiences of our ancestors, research published in the open access journal BMC Medicine suggests. Scientists investigating pregnancies in four generations of rats show that inherited epigenetic effects of stress could affect pregnancies for generations.""Gerlinde Metz, senior author of the article, says: "We show that stress across generations becomes powerful enough to shorten pregnancy length in rats and induce hallmark features of human preterm birth. A surprising finding was that mild to moderate stress during pregnancy had a compounding effect across generations. Thus, the effects of stress grew larger with each generation.""
