Why the ‘Peculiar’ Stands Out in Our Memory Ohio State professor speaks on the neuroscience of remembering

Newswise, June 27, 2017 – Memories that stick with us for a lifetime are those that fit in with a lot of other things we remember – but have a slightly weird twist.

 It’s this notion of ‘peculiarity’ that can help us understand what makes lasting memories, according to Per Sederberg, a professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

 “You have to build a memory on the scaffolding of what you already know, but then you have to violate the expectations somewhat. It has to be a little bit weird,” Sederberg said.

 Sederberg talked about the neuroscience of memory as an invited speaker at the prestigious Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in France on June 19. He spoke at the session “What are memories made of? Stirring emotions and last impressions” along with several advertising professionals and artists.

 Sederberg has spent his career studying memory. In one of his most notable studies, he had college students wear a smartphone around their neck with an app that took random photos for a month. Later, the participants relived memories related to those photos in an fMRI scanner so that Sederberg and his colleagues could see where and how the brain stored the time and place of those memories.

 From his own research and that of others, Sederberg has ideas on which memories stick with us and which ones fade over time.

 The way to create a long-lasting memory is to form an association with other memories, he said.

 “If we want to be able to retrieve a memory later, you want to build a rich web.  It should connect to other memories in multiple ways, so there are many ways for our mind to get back to it.”

 A memory of a lifetime is like a big city, with many roads that lead there.  We forget memories that are desert towns, with only one road in. “You want to have a lot of different ways to get to any individual memory,” Sederberg said.

 The difficulty is how to best navigate the push and pull between novelty and familiarity. Novelty tells us what is important to remember. On the other hand, familiarity tells us what we can ignore, but helps us retrieve information later, Sederberg said.

 Too much novelty, and you have no way to place it in your cognitive map, but too much familiarity and the information is similarly lost.

 What that means is that context and prediction play critical roles in shaping our perception and memory. The most memorable experiences are those that arise in a familiar and stable context, yet violate some aspect of what we predict would occur in that context, he said.

 “Those peculiar experiences are the things that stand out, that make a more lasting memory.”

 Sederberg’s co-presenters, all based in London, are Dominique Bonnafoux, a senior strategist at FITCH; Mike Reed, founder and creative director of Reed Words; and Jason Bruges, a multidisciplinary artist and designer.

Mindfulness Shows Promise as We Age, but Study Results Are Mixed

Scientists still searching for best approaches in older adults

Newswise, March 9, 2017 – As mindfulness practices rise in popularity and evidence of their worth continues to accumulate, those who work with aging populations are looking to use the techniques to boost cognitive, emotional and physiological health.

But studies so far have shown mixed results in the elderly, and more investigation is needed to determine exactly how best to apply mindfulness in that population, a new review of the research to date has found.

A majority of the 27 studies in the review suggest that the focused attention at the core of mindfulness benefits older people, but others don’t point to improvements.

And that should prompt more rigorous investigations in search of interventions likely to do the most good, researchers from The Ohio State University found. Their analysis appears in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.

“Mindfulness is a practice that really serves as a way to foster a greater quality of life and there’s been some thought that it could help with cognitive decline as we age,” said Stephanie Fountain-Zaragoza, lead author of the study and a graduate student in psychology.

“Given the growing interest in mindfulness in general, we wanted to determine what we know right now so that researchers can think about where we go from here,” she said.

The good news so far: The evidence from a variety of studies points to some benefits for older adults, suggesting that mindfulness training might be integrated into senior centers and group homes, the researchers found.

Older people are an especially important population to study given diminished social support, physical limitations and changes in cognitive health, the researchers point out.

Studies of mindfulness meditation usually involve three types of practices. The first, focused attention, involves sustained attention to a single thing (such as the breath) and an effort to disengage from other distractions.

Open monitoring meditation, often seen as the next step up in mindfulness, includes acknowledging the details of multiple phenomena (sensations, sounds, etc.) without selectively focusing on one of them.

“This includes being open to experiencing thoughts and sensations and emotions and taking them as they come and letting them go,” Fountain-Zaragoza said.

Loving-kindness meditation encourages a universal state of love and compassion toward oneself and others.

“The goal with this is to foster compassionate acceptance,” said senior author Ruchika Shaurya Prakash, director of Ohio State’s clinical neuroscience laboratory and an expert in mindfulness.

In addition to looking at how mindfulness contributed – or did not – to behavioral and cognitive functioning and to psychological wellbeing, some of the research also looked at its potential role in inflammation, which contributes to a variety of diseases.

In all categories of study, including inflammatory processes, Prakash and Fountain-Zaragoza found mixed results.

The hope is that mindfulness could help the elderly preserve attention and capitalize on emotional regulation strategies that naturally improve as we age, Prakash said.

“Around 50 percent of our lives, our minds are wandering and research from Harvard University has shown that the more your mind wanders, the less happy you are,” she said.

“Mindfulness allows you to become aware of that chaotic mind-wandering and provides a safe space to just breathe.”

In older people, mindfulness ideally has the potential to help with cognition, emotion and inflammation, but little research has been done so far and those studies that have been done have had mixed results and scientific limitations.

While most of the studies in the review showed positive results, the field is limited and would benefit greatly from larger randomized controlled trials, Fountain-Zaragoza said.

“We want to really be able to say that we have strong evidence that mindfulness is driving the changes we see,” she said.

No Spoilers! Most People Don't Want to Know Their Future

Learning what the future holds, good or bad, not appealing to most, study says

Newswise, March 9, 2017-- Given the chance to see into the future, most people would rather not know what life has in store for them, even if they think those events could make them happy, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

“In Greek mythology, Cassandra, daughter of the king of Troy, had the power to foresee the future. But, she was also cursed and no one believed her prophecies,” said the study’s lead author, Gerd Gigerenzer, PhD, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. “In our study, we’ve found that people would rather decline the powers that made Cassandra famous, in an effort to forgo the suffering that knowing the future may cause, avoid regret and also maintain the enjoyment of suspense that pleasurable events provide.”

Two nationally representative studies involving more than 2,000 adults in Germany and Spain found that 85 to 90 percent of people would not want to know about upcoming negative events, and 40 to 70 percent preferred to remain ignorant of upcoming positive events.

Only 1 percent of participants consistently wanted to know what the future held. The findings are published in the APA journal Psychological Review.

The researchers also found that people who prefer not to know the future are more risk averse and more frequently buy life and legal insurance than those who want to know the future.

This suggests that those who choose to be ignorant anticipate regret, Gigerenzer said. The length of time until an event would occur also played a role: Deliberate ignorance was more likely the nearer the event.

For example, older adults were less likely than younger adults to want to know when they or their partner would die, and the cause of death.

Participants were asked about a large range of potential events, both positive and negative.

For example, they were asked if they wanted to know who won a soccer game they had planned to watch later, what they were getting for Christmas, whether there is life after death and if their marriage would eventually end in divorce.

Finding out the sex of their unborn child was the only item in the survey where more people wanted to know than didn’t, with only 37 percent of participants saying they wouldn’t want to know.

Although people living in Germany and Spain vary in age, education and other important aspects, the pattern of deliberate ignorance was highly consistent across the two countries, according to the article, including its prevalence and predictability.

“Wanting to know appears to be the natural condition of humankind, and in no need of justification. People are not just invited but also often expected to participate in early detection for cancer screening or in regular health check-ups, to subject their unborn babies to dozens of prenatal genetic tests, or to use self-tracking health devices,” said Gigerenzer .

 “Not wanting to know appears counterintuitive and may raise eyebrows, but deliberate ignorance, as we’ve shown here, doesn’t just exist; it is a widespread state of mind.”

________________________________________
Article: “Cassandra’s Regret: The Psychology of Not Wanting to Know,” by Gerd Gigerenzer, PhD, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and Rocio Garcia-Retamero, PhD, University of Granada, Spain. Psychological Review, March, Vol. 124, No. 2.

Sociology Professor Addresses Caregiving Burden From Personal Perspective

Newswise, February 2, 2017— It’s not every day a researcher draws from their own experiences as the basis for a published study but that’s exactly what Miles Taylor, associate professor of sociology at Florida State University, has done in her latest paper addressing what she calls the structural burden of caregiving.

The study, “The Structural Burden of Caregiving: Shared Challenges in the United States and Canada,” published in the January edition of The Gerontologist, examines the caregiving stress associated with navigating the health care system in the United States and the social care system in Canada.

A call for papers from The Gerontologist prompted Taylor and her colleague Amélie Quesnel-Vallée, sociology professor at McGill University in Quebec, to consider their own experiences caring for aging parents and to see if those experiences exposed gaps in aging literature.

For Taylor and Quesnel-Vallée, the most noticeable void lay in the area of emphasis and quantifiable data on the amount of time caregivers spend negotiating treatment and services for their care recipients.

“Research up until now has really defined caregiving burden in terms of the amount of time and stress it takes to actually provide care to another person — helping with daily tasks and how especially difficult it can be when they need help with things that are very personal, like bathing,” Taylor said.

Taylor said previous models of caregiving burden have done a good job of notating interpersonal stresses, such as strained relationships and the demands in the caregiver’s life.

But what about the time spent negotiating health care systems, getting the care, getting treatments, figuring out when treatments will be covered and under which circumstances? That part of the caregiving burden, Taylor and Quesnel-Vallée say, isn’t well-articulated or measured.

It was 2010 when Taylor began caring for her grandmother, her only living parent, off and on for about 5 years. That was about the same time Quesnel-Vallée began caring for her mother in Canada. The two found their caregiving trajectories and experiences lined up so much, they decided to put their experiences in this paper.

Although they knew providing the direct care would be difficult, they were not prepared for how much time and stress they would spend trying to understand, negotiate and manage medical and related care for their loved ones. They contrasted the two care settings. Ultimately, they concluded that Canada offers more services for older adults and there is more transparency about what is and what is not covered.

However, there were some common themes among the Canadian and American systems. In both systems the researchers found that a great deal of time was spent negotiating and managing care and services but the burden often went unrecognized. They also found in their experience as caregivers that the systems were characterized by discontinuous and fragmented care.

The final common theme researchers noted was the gross potential for inequity for both the caregivers and care recipients.

“We kept telling each other over the course of the past six years, if we felt like this was so difficult and if we had such a hard time, how in the world would other folks begin to deal with this? It must be so much more burdensome,” Taylor said.

Taylor and Quesnel-Vallée felt their education, income and even their race gave them more social currency and health care literacy to help them gain information and access services.

The pair want the paper to not only inform health care professionals and policymakers about the aforementioned issues with the two care systems, but also the caregivers themselves.

“We hope caregivers will understand this part of caregiving, the stress involved in managing care and negotiating services, constitutes caregiving time and stress,” Taylor said. “Often, we felt it wasn’t counted in terms of how much time is spent caring for someone else.”

Through their testimony, Taylor and Quesnel-Vallée also hope other scholars will move forward and try to measure this time and stress related to managing care better. Right now, most surveys only question how much time caregivers take feeding or bathing their care recipient or providing other daily tasks such as taking out the trash.

“I think that now we should increasingly ask how much time and stress did you spend negotiating with medical care, and Medicare, and trying to figure out which services were available and when,” Taylor said.

Taylor says a number of people are experiencing the structural burden of caregiving even though it’s not clearly in the literature yet. They hope caregiving theory can broaden and consider this structural burden, especially considering advanced medical practices are causing people to live longer.

“There was a very recent caregiving report that said over half of caregivers are actually engaged in these kinds of tasks, yet we don’t quantify that,” Taylor said. “We don’t say how much time is this taking up? So that’s what we’re hoping to do, shed more light on it — and I think when you give something a name and a clear theme and definition — that’s when you can get the ball rolling to help people to talk about it more.”

No Excuses: Real Reason You’re Late May Vary with Age

Young and old use different strategies to estimate passage of time, study finds

 

Newswise, January 16, 2017--A song is just a song, but as time goes by, something as random as a song’s length could be the difference in whether you miss an important deadline or arrive late for an appointment, suggests time-management research from Washington University in St. Louis.

The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, shows that people rely heavily on time estimates of past experiences to plan for future tasks and that outside influences, such as background music, can skew our perception of time, causing even the best-laid plans to go awry.

“Our results suggest time estimates of tasks that we need to incorporate into our later plans, like a drive to an appointment, are often based on our memory of how long it took us to perform that same drive previously,” said Emily Waldum, principal author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher in psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences.

“Even if you think you estimated the duration of events accurately, external factors unrelated to that event can bias time estimates,” she said.

“Something as simple as the number of songs you heard play on your phone during a run can influence whether you over- or under-estimate the duration of the run.”

In a complicated modern world where multitasking is the norm, it’s easy for our game plans to fall apart due to breakdowns in “prospective memory,” a term psychologists use to describe the process of remembering to do something in the future.

Waldum and co-author Mark McDaniel, a professor of psychological and brain sciences, designed this study to tease out differences in how people young and old approach a challenge that requires them to plan ahead and complete a series of time-based tasks by a specific deadline.

The research included 36 college undergraduates and 34 healthy older adults in their 60s, 70s and 80s. It aimed to simulate the complicated time-based prospective memory (TBPM) challenges that people old and young experience in everyday life.

In the first part of the study, participants were asked to keep track of how long it took to complete a trivia quiz. The quiz always ran 11 minutes, but participants had to make their own time estimates without access to a clock. Some completed the quiz with no background noise, while others heard either two long songs or four short songs.

Later, the participants were challenged to put together as many pieces of a puzzle as possible while leaving enough time to complete the same quiz before a 20-minute deadline.

Contrary to previous research, this study found that seniors managed to complete future tasks on time at about the same rate as college undergraduates, although each age group used surprisingly different strategies to estimate how much time they would need to repeat the quiz and finish the next phase of the experiment on deadline.

Older adults reported ignoring songs heard in the background, relying instead on an internal clock to estimate how long it took them to complete the first quiz. 

Consistent with other research on internal clocks and time perception,  seniors in this experiment tended to underestimate time taken on the first quiz. This led them to spend a little too much time on the puzzle and to finish the second quiz a bit beyond deadline.

“When younger adults heard two long songs during the first quiz, they performed a lot like older adults, underestimating the quiz duration and winding up a bit late,” Waldum said.

“When they heard four short songs, younger adults overestimated how much time they would need to repeat the quiz leading them to finish it too early.”

Thus, older adults performed about the same, regardless of whether they heard songs or not. For young people though, background music played a big role in whether they were too early or too late, Waldum said.

While the challenges of being on time may remain largely the same throughout a lifetime, this study suggests that the tricks we use to stay on schedule may evolve as we age.

For college students with young, agile minds and no fear of multitasking, using songs to estimate the passage of time may be a plausible approach when no clock is available.

“In a scenario where the duration of a background event is set, such as a 30-minute television show, this is a very good strategy because it provides useful duration information whether you’re paying attention to the show or not,” Waldum said.

“However, when background events are less predictable, as in the case with songs and many other events, basing a time estimate on them can be risky.”

Older adults, who generally see declines in memory and the speed at which they process information, tended to avoid multitasking throughout the study.

During the first quiz, they ignored songs and relied more on an internal clock to make time estimates. In the second phase of the study when a clock was made available, they were less likely to pause working on the puzzle and quiz to check the clock.

These findings suggest that older adults may actually over-rely on their internal clocks that give us a feeling of elapsed time. Checking a clock when it is available is a much better strategy than relying on a feeling of elapsed time, and indeed increased clock-checking predicts better time-based prospective memory performance in this and many other previous studies.

Therefore, even if checking the clock requires some multitasking, it is worth your time, Waldum said.

No matter what challenges the future brings — getting out the door and to work, finishing walking the dog before the cookies are done or purchasing popcorn before a movie starts — the fundamentals of being on time still apply.

You must remember this: Success requires making accurate estimates of the time needed to complete prerequisite tasks, remembering to carry out these tasks at the appropriate time and avoiding distractions that could prevent you from staying on schedule.

“Our study provides some good news for older adults,” Waldum said. “Our results, while preliminary, suggest that time-management ability and the ability to perform some types of complex time-based tasks in real life may largely be preserved with age.”

Are We More Risk Averse as We Get Older? It’s a Gray (Matter )

Newswise, December 26, 2016 — Age itself is not the determining factor in how an individual views or tolerates risk when making decisions; instead, it is the age-related decline in the volume of gray matter in our brains, research by NYU’s Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Decision Making shows.

“These results provide a basis for understanding the neural mechanisms involved in risky choices and offer a glimpse into the dynamics that affect decision-making in an aging population,” explains study co-author Paul Glimcher, a professor at NYU’s Center for Neural Science and director of the Interdisciplinary Study of Decision Making (IISDM).

“This research can help us improve how we communicate with the elderly about complex issues that may present risks to them.”

“Older adults need to make many important financial and medical decisions, often under high levels of uncertainty,” adds lead author Ifat Levy, an associate professor of comparative medicine and of neuroscience at Yale University and visiting professor at IISDM.

“We know that decision making changes with age, but we don’t really know what the biological basis of these changes is. In this paper, we make the first step towards answering this question, by showing that the decrease in gray matter volume in a particular part of the brain – posterior parietal cortex – accounts for the increase in risk aversion observed with age."

The study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications, focused on the right posterior parietal cortex (rPPC)—a part of the brain involved in planning movements, spatial reasoning, and attention.

For the study, the research team presented a series of choices to 52 study participants, aged 18 to 88 years. Participants could either receive $5 or take their chances with a lottery of varying amounts and probabilities.

For example, a participant could choose the certain gain of $5 or opt for a 25 percent chance of getting $20. The researchers also measured the gray matter volume in the posterior parietal cortex of each subject, drawn from MRI scans.

After analyzing the risk choices and MRI measurements, the researchers confirmed that age-related decline in risk tolerance correlates more with changes in brain anatomy than with age.

The study’s other authors were: Michael Grubb, an NYU postdoctoral fellow at the time of the study and now an assistant professor at Trinity College in Connecticut; Agnieszka Tymula, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney; and Sharon Gilaie-Dotan, a postdoctoral fellow at University College London.

The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01 5R01AG033406, R21AG049293); the DOI for this paper will be 10.1038/NCOMMS13822.

Do Thoughts of Death Change Our Shopping Habits?

A new study from Concordia and HEC explores how mortality affects consumerism

Newswise, December 26, 2016-- It's been that time of year again: when festive ads command consumers to BUY! BUY! BUY! for their friends and family. But despite this holiday cheer, negative news marches on.

Reports of plane crashes, terrorist attacks, fatal car accidents and deadly fires may lead shoppers to think more about their own mortality than buying that new holiday sweater for Uncle Dave.

But new research from the John Molson School of Business (JMSB) and HEC Montréal shows that, for people with certain world views, thoughts of death can actually trigger the buying impulse.

In a study recently published in The Journal of Consumer Affairs, marketing professors Michel Laroche and Marcelo Nepomuceno found that the habits of spendthrifts don't change after contemplating their own mortality.

Compulsive shoppers, on the other hand, go out and buy more.

"Previous research shows that thoughts of death lead individuals to strongly defend world views that maintain their self-esteem," Laroche says.

"In other words, thinking about death will likely make people cling even more strongly to their beliefs because it's a way to cope with mortality."

Laroche and Nepomuceno wanted to test this assumption with anti-consumers -- people who voluntarily resist consumption out of a sense of frugality or desire to live simply, and with over-consumers -- folks who shop till they drop, no matter the season.

The researchers ran two experiments with 503 North American university students. The respondents were first asked to answer questionnaires identifying their tendency to resist consumption. They were then randomly assigned to one of two groups:

1.     In the "death thoughts" group, participants were asked to describe what they would feel if they were dying.
2. In the control group, participants were asked to report what they would feel if they were submitted to a painful dental procedure.

2.     

'Anti-consumers seem to care less about consumption than over-consumers!'

Afterwards, participants indicated their inclination to purchase a series of products. By comparing the participants in each condition, the researchers were able to identify individual tendencies to increase or reduce consumption due to thoughts of death.

"Our expectation was that the anti-consumption individuals would become even more inclined to resist consumption. This would indicate that for them, resistance was an important source of self-esteem," Nepomuceno says.

"In fact, we found that anti-consumers were not influenced by thoughts of death, which suggests that they do not believe that resistance to consumption is a source of self-esteem. In other words, anti-consumers seem to care less about consumption than over-consumers!"

Interestingly, among consumers inclined to over-consume, the researchers found that thinking about death made them even more likely to buy.

"This indicates that such consumers see purchasing and having goods and services as an important source of self-esteem. When they think about death, they become more inclined to buy because this helps them feel better about themselves," Nepomuceno explains.

He and Laroche, who was recently named editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, hope that the results of this study will arm the general public -- especially those inclined toward retail therapy -- with a better understanding of how consumption is influenced by situational factors. They also aim to show the occurrence of such influences without the full knowledge of the consumer.