General announcements
January 3rd, 2012 2:52pm
Avoid flow to learn better?
That’s the advice from a blogger/writer who has been studying and writing about how to achieve excellence. It’s mainly advice passed on from an expert piano player, but it has a certain intuitive appeal to it.
I think the idea comes from the perspective of “deliberate practice” and the idea that practicing that which is too easy (and therefore you experience a flow state during practice) does not lead to improvement.
Can we reconcile this with our idea that practice should maximize dopamine release by successfully overcoming challenges? I have described that idea previously as training so that you have as much success as possible while also realistically expecting that you might fail.
Perhaps we’d say that the flow state described by the pianist reflects a state of euphoria associated with performing so successfully that you cannot fail? That would separate the idea of a “flow state” from our idea of dopamine reward release — which is just a rough hypothesis anyway. Or perhaps the experience of the truly skilled expert is that they need to be challenged with more difficult training tasks to hit the maximal training reward level. That would account for the pianist’s experience seeing the “mediocre” practicing things that seem too easy as just reflecting the fact that they are less skilled and simpler training tasks are optimal for them. I wonder if anybody at the Music School here would have any insight on this kind of phenomenon.
In theory, we could test this with the SISL task by comparing sequence learning in conditions where we set the task speed to adaptively keep people at 75% correct or at ~100% correct (then test them under identical conditions).
Posted by Paul
December 2nd, 2011 4:40pm
Starcraft in SciAm
This is cool, but I have to say I’m also a little sad that I didn’t write this…
How a Computer Game is Reinventing the Science of Expertise
There’s also some discussion of Starcraft as brain training to boot.
Posted by Paul
November 16th, 2011 2:42pm
Writing Time
Conferences
SFN is done. Huzzah. MPA and CNS are both submitted, and now we wait for approvals (hopefully). Obviously not at the top of my “To Do” list, but nice to mention something that is technically crossed off.
Implicit/Explicit
I’m finally going to start editing this. Going through the manuscript, comments, and I’ll make sure we’re getting to all the literature we should be.
F31
This is going to be quite a bit of work (as usual). I just got in touch with Catherine Berardi to get the OSR paperwork and everything started.
Next Quarter
I was discussing with Matt that it might be good to run the Variable Velocity paradigm since it complements the single column task really well. We might see transfer in one, but not the other, or transfer in neither. In either case, it would make a strong case for the visuo-spatial perceptual component being quite important for learning/expression. What else might we be running?
Posted by Danny
November 9th, 2011 2:42pm
Glitch
These guys are building the social networking/gaming environment that would be idea for embedding cognitive training
Tuning the quests and interactions to provide the right level of difficulty and reward was complicated. In beta testing, the development team found that while singing to butterflies was repetitive and boring, people would still sing to butterflies obsessively—because it provided small but guaranteed amounts of experience. The devs tried to balance this by making singing to animals cost energy, but then players simply farmed huge numbers of girly drinks (which made animals interactions cost no energy) and continued to grind the same thing again and again. The girly drinks were then nerfed, and people immediately complained.
“We realized that if we incentivized things that were inherently boring,” Butterfield told me, “people would do them again and again—it showed up in the logs—but that they would secretly hate us.”
Just make the grindy things (singing to butterflies) training for WM, attention, executive control, etc. We can put up with being secretly hated if we are covertly improving their brains.
Posted by Paul
November 9th, 2011 11:26am
Autism–excess of neurons?
An interesting article came out on the TIME website today, haven’t looked at the actual paper, but seems like a good read.
http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/09/study-autistic-children-have-too-many-brain-neurons/
Posted by eyarnik
November 7th, 2011 4:27pm
Stem Cells & Parkinson’s Research
This seems like a pretty interesting bit of research that suggests that stem cells might actually be applicable to treatment at some point.
The real question is, will this eventually destroy potential funding or need for Parkinson’s research? It’s funny to think that a large line of research may someday be moot.
Posted by Danny
November 7th, 2011 4:21pm
Midwestern Psychological Association 2012 (Chicago, IL)
Title: Coordinated action and timing responses separated across hands are integrated in sequence learning.
Area: Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning and Memory.
Problem or Major Purpose: Skill learning relies on a flexible explicit set of actions to perform which provides scaffolding for the relatively inflexible implicit representation supporting performance improvements through practice. A key question regarding implicit knowledge is to what extent the timing and order of sequential movements is specific and inflexible to what was practiced. Sanchez, Gobel, & Reber (2010) previously used the Serial Interception Sequence Learning (SISL) task to demonstrate implicit learning in healthy patients with little trace of associated explicit knowledge. In the SISL task, participants’ attempt to make a precisely-timed motor response to cues scrolling down a monitor toward one of four target zones. The cues follow a covertly-embedded repeating sequence of cue order and inter-cue timing. Other work examining the integration of sequential response order and timing with the SISL task has shown that these two sources of information are integrated during learning (Gobel, Sanchez, & Reber, 2011). This produces a surprisingly inflexible knowledge representation which resists transfer to very similar motor sequences.
Procedure: To test the hypothesis that sequence inflexibility arose from the need to combine order and timing information into a single keypress response, SISL learning was examined with a guitar-shaped manipulandum that separated action selection and response timing across hands and required a bimanually-coordinated response on each trial. Twenty-eight Northwestern University undergraduates (17 F, Mean Age = 21.3 years) participated for course credit. Participants completed 2880 trials of training on the SISL task, followed by a test where the order of cue responses and inter-cue timing were separately manipulated from the trained sequence in order to assess transfer to sequences with novel timing or novel order.
Results: Participants exhibited sequence-specific performance improvements for only the trained sequence and performance was equivalent to an unpracticed sequence if either timing or order was disrupted. Separate examination of each hand individually also failed to show any evidence of partial transfer from the trained sequence.
Conclusions and Implications: When response timing and order are both necessary for coordinated sequence performance, they become integrated in the motor plan that is necessary for expression even when expressed largely through different hands. These results have broader implications to educational training whereby rote practice of cognitive or motor skills may result in a hyper-specific, inflexible knowledge representation.
Mini-Abstract: Skill learning was examined with a guitar-shaped manipulandum that separated action selection and response timing across hands and required a bimanually-coordinated response on each trial. Participants exhibited sequence-specific performance improvements for only the trained sequence and performance was equivalent to an unpracticed sequence if either timing or order was disrupted.
Posted by Danny
November 4th, 2011 1:07pm
osu!
A new paradigm for studying expertise? Osu! is a free rhythm game that uses the mouse instead of the keyboard. It’s pretty hard, but some people get pretty good at it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=mCAE6nzB6LI#t=526s
The game itself is available here: http://osu.ppy.sh/
It has potential value for introspection during skill learning, I think. If you practice a specific “map” until you beat it, you’ll definitely notice that you’re getting better via skill learning. But there is also a powerful sense of familiarity — you definitely feel like you recognize the sequence as you repeat it. The memory system theory question is: is that conscious memory contributing to learning or is it epiphenomenal?
P.S. It’s mildly tricky to get running. You have to download and install the executable, create an account on their site, then you can browse and download specific maps to try to play. Also fair warning: much of the music is horrible.
Posted by Paul
October 19th, 2011 1:04pm
Facebook and gray matter density
Haven’t done a Randomness in awhile. This one is courtesy of Syeda in the Beeman lab:
Facebook Friend Count Linked to Brain Density
(mashable.com reporting from Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences)
The write-up even nicely opens with the correlation/causation problem — do brain differences cause more friends or do more friends cause brain differences? The areas of gray matter density correlating with number of friends are a collection of temporal lobe regions, mostly non-MTL. Intriguing but not trivial to make sense of. I headed to google scholar to see if there was any other work in this area and found a study on Facebook use in TBI patients (http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/02699052.2011.613086). Interestingly, they also approach Facebook/social networking as a positive thing and with these patients find what we’d expect: some barriers to use related to level of impairment and prior familiarity.
Posted by Paul
October 5th, 2011 1:49pm
Amusing Placebo Video
I’m not claiming this video is accurate, because the author is apparently a Professor of Funk.
In either case, it’s interesting and speaks to pseudo-effects.
Posted by Danny