Psychological Bulletin – Dr Martin Fracker

Does Your Mind Wander When You Should Be Paying Attention? Join the Club!

Imagine you are driving to a meeting. It’s a long drive and you don’t want to miss your exit off the freeway. But while you are driving, your mind begins to wander off to other things, like the argument you had with your spouse yesterday, or the Hawaiian vacation you are planning for next winter. And then after a while you notice that you past your exit over a ten minutes ago! Does this mean there is something wrong with you? Are you starting to lose your mind? The answer is no. As Zanesco and colleagues confirmed in a meta-analysis of 68 studies of mind wandering during task performance, it just means you are like everyone else!

How Do Our Cognitive Abilities Change As We Age?

In July 2024, President Joe Biden withdrew from his campaign for reelection to the US Presidency largely due to concerns over his apparent decline in cognitive abilities. But what do we actually know about how our cognitive abilities decline as we age? Breit and colleagues decided to examine the stability of eleven major cognitive abilities over the lifespan from preschool age to late adulthood (80 and older). They analyzed the results of 205 studies testing over 87 thousand individuals at various points in their lives, using a test-retest procedure. As we might expect, they found that cognitive abilities grow rapidly during the first 20 years of life and then become remarkably stable for the remainder of the lifespan. Nevertheless, significant individual differences in cognitive stability appeared in later adulthood with some older individuals (55 to 90 years of age) showing greater declines in cognitive ability than others in the same age group, with the biggest individual differences in cognitive stability appearing around age 70.

Fluid versus Crystallized Cognitive Abilities

One particularly important finding was that reasoning abilities that require cognitive effort (fluid reasoning) were more likely than knowledge-based abilities (crystallized intelligence) to decline as people aged. The authors explained this somewhat counter-intuitive result as follows:

This theory proposes that during cognitive development, fluid (or effortful processing–based) abilities are invested in the acquisition of crystallized (or knowledge-based) abilities. As the result of years of cumulative investment, these crystallized abilities are acquired and automated, such that they are better maintained even as currently available processing power wanes with aging…or varies from day to day. [p.424]

President Joe Biden, prior to his decision to end his reelection campaign, similarly argued that while he was indeed aging, he had accumulated vast wisdom and political know-how; that is, crystallized intelligence. He was probably right. Voters’ concern of course was that a President also needs to be able to reason through new problems that inevitably arise from time-to-time, if not daily.

Not Getting Enough Sleep Affects Your Emotional Health

We have all experienced nights when we didn’t get enough sleep. And we may have noticed that as a result we were more irritable or more anxious or generally less able to handle stressful situations. In order to understand better the effects of sleep deprivation on our emotional health, Palmer and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis over 154 relevant studies. They found that, as many of us may have experienced, sleep deprivation often reduces positive emotions and increases anxiety. The authors also found that disrupting REM (normal dreaming) sleep increased negative emotions more than disruptions during other stages of sleep.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy Works with Depressed Young People By Reducing Negative Thinking

The authors of this study tried to determine the mechanisms by which two types of psychotherapy help relieve clinical depression in young people: Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) and Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT). To do this, they examined the results of 34 randomized controlled experiments, 27 of which focused on CBT while only 6 examined IPT studies and one included both CBT and IPT. Among their results, they found clear evidence that CBT helps to alleviate depression by reducing negative thinking.

But how does CBT reduce negative thinking? In theory, CBT should reduce negative thinking by improving the person’s problem solving skills and helping them to reframe or change how they think about problems in their lives. But the authors did not find evidence that CBT improved problem solving or reframing. Does this mean that CBT doesn’t work the way we think it does? Or does it mean that we are just not very good at measuring problem solving skill or reframing? Answers to those questions remain for the future. For now, it may be sufficient to know that CBT does reduce negative thinking in young people and thereby helps them to overcome depression.

How Much More Is $100 Today Worth To You Than $200 Next Year? It Depends!

Talk to a young adult who is planning to skip college so they can get a job and start working today. Try to explain to them that they could eventually make a lot more money if they graduated from college in four years with a marketable degree. Quite often they will be unmoved because $100 today is simply worth more to them than $400 four years from now. Psychologists call this relative judgment of worth “delay discounting.”

Many of us think that delay discounting affects young people more than older adults, perhaps because greater maturity and wisdom enables older adults to more clearly see the benefits of waiting until our earning power has increased. There are actually several different theories to explain why delay discounting lessens as we age, but some of those theories predict that delay discounting isn’t linear with age but rather “U-shaped” where delay discounting decreases with age up to a point and then increases again as we continue to grow older. Such a U-shaped discounting effect may make sense to us if we consider that a delay of ten years, say, may loom larger to a seventy year old than to a thirty year old.

Lu and colleagues decided to test the predictions of various theories of delay discounting by performing a meta-analysis of 105 relevant research studies. They found that those theories that predict a U-shaped discounting effect were indeed correct, but that the reasons for the U-shape are more complicated than just how many years one has left.

Do Emotions Make It Harder to Think and Act Logically?

In the classic television show “Star Trek”, the Vulcan character Mr. Spock was able to think and act more logically than his human shipmates because he did not experience emotions. The implication of course is that human emotions somehow interfere with thinking logically. But is this true?

There have been many experiments designed to find out whether emotions interfere with something called “cognitive control”, which is the ability to ignore irrelevant information that would otherwise interfere with performing an important cognitive task. Results from these experiments have been confusing, so Zhang and colleagues decided to see if a meta-analysis of 71 of these studies would clear things up. Their results show that the kinds of emotions that can be studied in a laboratory setting don’t interfere much with cognitive control and may, under the right circumstances, even help. So perhaps Vulcans don’t have such a big advantage over us emotional humans after all.

It’s Right in Front of You!

You open the refrigerator looking for the ketchup but you don’t see it. You ask your spouse “Where did you put the ketchup?” They look and say “It’s right there in front of you!” And then, surprised, suddenly you see it. You have just experienced inattentional blindness (IB).

Inattentional Blindness happens to most of us everyday. It may manifest as “refrigerator blindness” or “pantry blindness” or, more seriously, “pedestrian blindness” while driving. But what causes IB? There are two main theories: Attention Set and Load Theory (Attention Capacity). Attention Set predicts IB will occur when a person is looking for one thing and doesn’t see something else, which doesn’t seem to fit the “refrigerator blindness” example but could explain “pedestrian blindness”. Load Theory, on the other hand, predicts IB will occur when attention capacity is somehow overloaded, which could explain both refrigerator and pedestrian blindness. Hutchinson and colleagues set out to discover whether data from 81 different studies testing one or both of the theories could help determine which theory did a better job overall of explaining IB. Their conclusion: both theories do a pretty good job of explaining Inattentional Blindness but do so under different circumstances.

Do Autistic Individuals Gesture Less than Neurotypical Individuals?

When people try to communicate with others, they may use different types of gestures to make their meaning clear. Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have been thought to gesture less than others, but recent research suggests whether that is true depends on the type of gesture. Deictic gestures include actions such as pointing and reaching. Emblematic gestures communicate semantic meaning such as nodding the head to mean “yes” or shrugging the shoulders to mean “I don’t know.” Iconic gestures visually represent an object, action, or concept such as forming a circle with the hands to represent a ball, sliding a hand rapidly from left to right to indicate a car racing past, and so on.

Nicola McKern and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 31 articles comparing the gestures of over 700 ASD individuals to those of 860 neurotypical individuals. They found that autistic individuals do indeed exhibit fewer deictic and emblematic gestures than others, but that they do not generally differ from others in the production of iconic gestures.

These researchers believe the most important conclusion from their analysis is that we should not prematurely rule out a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder simply because a person gestures normally to communicate.