A timely study in the journal Human Factors suggests why texting while driving is riskier than talking on a cell phone or with another passenger. Human factors/ergonomics researchers at the University of Utah found that texters in a driving simulator had more crashes, responded more slowly to brake lights on cars in front of them, and showed impairment in forward and lateral control than did drivers who talked on a cell phone while driving or drove without texting.

Researchers Frank Drews and colleagues found evidence that attention patterns differ for drivers who text versus those who converse on a cell phone. In the latter case, the researchers say, "drivers apparently attempt to divide attention between a phone conversation and driving, adjusting the processing priority of the two activities depending on task demands." But texting requires drivers to switch their attention from one task to the other. When such attention-switching occurs as drivers compose, read, or receive a text, their overall reaction times are substantially slower than when they're engaged in a phone conversation. The type of texting activity also appears to make a difference; in this study, reading messages affected braking times more than did composing them.

The hazards of texting while driving continue to receive broad national and international attention as accident rates attributed to this practice increase. As a result, a growing number of U.S. cities and states, as well as Canadian provinces, ban texting while operating a vehicle. Drews et al. noted that according to CTIA (www.ctia.org), more than 1 trillion text messages were sent in 2008 in the United States alone. To find why and how much drivers are impaired during texting, the researchers engaged 20 men and 20 women between the ages of 19 and 23 in both a single task (straight driving) and a dual task (driving and texting) in a high-fidelity simulator. The participants, experienced texters with an average of 4.75 years of driving experience, received and sent messages while the researchers observed their brake onset time, following distance, lane maintenance, and collisions.

The crash risk attributable to texting is substantial. One possible explanation is that drivers who text tend to decrease their minimum following distance and also experience delayed reaction time. For example, in the Drews et al. study, drivers' median reaction time increased by 30 percent when they were texting and 9 percent when they talked on the phone, compared with their performance in a driving-only condition.

Religious people tend to use their own beliefs as a guide in thinking about what God believes, but are less constrained when reasoning about other people's beliefs, according to new study published in the Nov. 30 early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nicholas Epley, professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, led the research, which included a series of survey and neuroimaging studies to examine the extent to which people's own beliefs guide their predictions about God's beliefs. The findings of Epley and his co-authors at Australia's Monash University and UChicago extend existing work in psychology showing that people are often egocentric when they infer other people's beliefs.

The PNAS paper reports the results of seven separate studies. The first four include surveys of Boston rail commuters, UChicago undergraduate students and a nationally representative database of online respondents in the United States. In these surveys, participants reported their own belief about an issue, their estimated God's belief, along with a variety of others, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Major League Baseball's Barry Bonds, President George W. Bush, and an average American.

Two other studies directly manipulated people's own beliefs and found that inferences about God's beliefs tracked their own beliefs. Study participants were asked, for example, to write and deliver a speech that supported or opposed the death penalty in front of a video camera. Their beliefs were surveyed both before and after the speech.

The final study involved functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the neural activity of test subjects as they reasoned about their own beliefs versus those of God or another person. The data demonstrated that reasoning about God's beliefs activated many of the same regions that become active when people reasoned about their own beliefs.

The researchers noted that people often set their moral compasses according to what they presume to be God's standards. "The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing," they conclude. "This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing."

But the research in no way denies the possibility that God's presumed beliefs also may provide guidance in situations where people are uncertain of their own beliefs, the co-authors noted.

Texting, Talking and Other Uses of the Cell Phone Behind the Wheel
(by Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist and Amanda Lenhart, Senior Research Specialist, Pew Internet & American Life Project)

Overview of Study: Over the summer of 2009, the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project conducted a survey of 800 teens ages 12-17 asking about their experiences with cell phone use in cars. All of the teens in our survey were asked about their experiences as passengers, and if they were age 16 or older and have a cell phone, they were also asked about their own actions behind the wheel including both talking and text messaging. Additionally, the Pew Internet Project and the University of Michigan conducted nine focus groups with teens ages 12-18 between June and October 2009 where the topic of driving and mobile phones was addressed. The following are the major findings from the survey and focus groups:

• 75% of all American teens ages 12-17 own a cell phone, and 66% use their phones to send or receive text messages.
  
• Older teens are more likely than younger teens to have cell phones and use text messaging; 82% of teens ages 16-17 have a cell phone and 76% of that cohort are cell phone texters.
  
• One in three (34%) texting teens ages 16-17 say they have texted while driving. That translates into 26% of all American teens ages 16-17.
  
• Half (52%) of cell-owning teens ages 16-17 say they have talked on a cell phone while driving. That translates into 43% of all American teens ages 16-17.
  
• 48% of all teens ages 12-17 say they have been in a car when the driver was texting.
  
• 40% say they have been in a car when the driver used a cell phone in a way that put themselves or others in danger.

[full report available here (.pdf)]

Two new studies of pedestrian safety found that using a cell phone while hoofing it can endanger one's health. Older pedestrians, in particular, are impaired when crossing a busy (simulated) street while speaking on a mobile phone, the researchers found.

The studies, in which participants crossed a virtual street while talking on the phone or listening to music, found that the music-listeners were able to navigate traffic as well as the average unencumbered pedestrian. Users of hands-free cell phones, however, took longer to cross the same street under the same conditions and were more likely to get run over.

Older cell-phone users, especially those unsteady on their feet to begin with, were even more likely to become traffic casualties. "Many people assume that walking is so automatic that really nothing will get in the way," said University of Illinois psychology professor Art Kramer, who led the research with psychology professor Jason McCarley and postdoctoral researcher Mark Neider. "And walking is pretty automatic, but actually walking in environments that have lots of obstacles is perhaps not as automatic as one might think."

The first study, in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, found that college-age adults who were talking on a cell phone took 25 percent longer to cross the street than their peers who were not on the phone. They were also more likely to fail to cross the street in the 30 seconds allotted for the task, even though their peers were able to do so.

Each participant walked on a manual treadmill in a virtual environment, meaning that each encountered the exact same conditions – the same number and speed of cars, for example – as their peers. The second (and not yet published) study gave adults age 60 and above the same tasks, and included some participants who had a history of falling. The differences between those on and off the phone were even more striking in the older group, Kramer said. "Older adults on the phone got run over about 15 percent more often" than those not on the phone, he said, and those with a history of falling fared even worse. "So walking and talking on the phone while old, especially, appears to be dangerous," he said.

Students will have to use their brains to get good grades at school this year, according to new University of Toronto research that relates brain activity to undergraduate academic performance.

In the first study ever to link academic performance to a neural signal, participants performed a Stroop task – a well-known test of cognitive control – while hooked up to EEG electrodes that measured their brain activity. U of T researchers monitored a brain signal known as the error-related negativity (ERN) in each participant's brain while they completed the task. ERN signals are observed approximately 100 milliseconds after a mistake is made, and are involved in cognitive control and self-regulation. Large ERN signals indicate a participant is responding strongly when they've made a mistake; smaller ERN signals indicate they are less responsive to their mistakes.

The researchers then compared the size of each participant's ERN signals to their official university transcript grades. "Those students with larger ERN signals did significantly better in school, showing that these neural signals have important real world implications," says doctoral researcher Jacob Hirsh.

Hirsh says students with large ERN signals are more responsive to their own errors than are students with smaller ERNs. Those with large ERN signals are more likely to slow down in order to correct their mistakes and avoid future errors, which could contribute to better grades. Because the size of the ERN is only 50 per cent determined by genetics, though, Hirsh says students may be able to improve their ERN signals by attending to their mistakes, thereby helping to improve their academic performance. "The ERN is not set in stone," he says.

It's also key to note that having extremely large ERN signals is not ideal either, says Dr. Michael Inzlicht, UofT Psychology Professor and co-author on the paper. "Students with a small ERN may have more trouble in school, but people with a large ERN can suffer from crippling anxiety because they respond strongly to the smallest perceived errors in their own behaviour," says Inzlicht. "It all comes down to this: what is the optimal response to an error?"

Stanford Report || August 24, 2009
By Adam Gorlick

Attention, multitaskers (if you can pay attention, that is): Your brain may be in trouble. People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.

High-tech jugglers are everywhere – keeping up several e-mail and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television and jumping from one website to another while plowing through homework assignments.

But after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price. "They're suckers for irrelevancy," said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Everything distracts them."

Social scientists have long assumed that it's impossible to process more than one string of information at a time. The brain just can't do it. But many researchers have guessed that people who appear to multitask must have superb control over what they think about and what they pay attention to.

Is there a gift?
So Nass and his colleagues, Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, set out to learn what gives multitaskers their edge. What is their gift? "We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn't find it," said Ophir, the study's lead author and a researcher in Stanford's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab.

In each of their tests, the researchers split their subjects into two groups: those who regularly do a lot of media multitasking and those who don't. In one experiment, the groups were shown sets of two red rectangles alone or surrounded by two, four or six blue rectangles. Each configuration was flashed twice, and the participants had to determine whether the two red rectangles in the second frame were in a different position than in the first frame. They were told to ignore the blue rectangles, and the low multitaskers had no problem doing that. But the high multitaskers were constantly distracted by the irrelevant blue images. Their performance was horrible. Because the high multitaskers showed they couldn't ignore things, the researchers figured they were better at storing and organizing information. Maybe they had better memories.

The second test proved that theory wrong. After being shown sequences of alphabetical letters, the high multitaskers did a lousy job at remembering when a letter was making a repeat appearance. "The low multitaskers did great," Ophir said. "The high multitaskers were doing worse and worse the further they went along because they kept seeing more letters and had difficulty keeping them sorted in their brains."

Still puzzled
Puzzled but not yet stumped on why the heavy multitaskers weren't performing well, the researchers conducted a third test. If the heavy multitaskers couldn't filter out irrelevant information or organize their memories, perhaps they excelled at switching from one thing to another faster and better than anyone else. Wrong again, the study found.

The test subjects were shown images of letters and numbers at the same time and instructed what to focus on. When they were told to pay attention to numbers, they had to determine if the digits were even or odd. When told to concentrate on letters, they had to say whether they were vowels or consonants. Again, the heavy multitaskers underperformed the light multitaskers. "They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing," Ophir said. "The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds."

The researchers are still studying whether chronic media multitaskers are born with an inability to concentrate or are damaging their cognitive control by willingly taking in so much at once. But they're convinced the minds of multitaskers are not working as well as they could. "When they're in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they're not able to filter out what's not relevant to their current goal," said Wagner, an associate professor of psychology. "That failure to filter means they're slowed down by that irrelevant information."

So maybe it's time to stop e-mailing if you're following the game on TV, and rethink singing along with the radio if you're reading the latest news online. By doing less, you might accomplish more.

Psychologist urges critical thinking to cure 'primitive' notions

We see the face of the Virgin Mary staring up at us from a grilled cheese sandwich and sell the uneaten portion of our meal for $37,000 on eBay. We believe in ESP, ghosts, and angels over the scientific theory of evolution. While science offers a wealth of rational explanations for natural phenomena, we often prefer to embrace the fantasies that reassured our distant ancestors. And we'll even go to war to protect our delusions against those who do not share them.

These are examples of what evolutionary psychologist Hank Davis calls "Caveman Logic." Although some examples are funny, the condition itself is no laughing matter. In Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (Amazon.com, $13.59), Davis encourages us to transcend the mental default settings and tribal loyalties that worked well for our ancestors back in the Pleistocene age. Davis laments a modern world in which more people believe in ESP, ghosts, and angels than in evolution. Superstition and religion get particularly critical treatment, although he argues that religion, itself, is not the problem but "an inevitable by-product of how our minds misperform."

"Caveman Logic is a whirlwind tour through the deeper recesses of our evolved mind. Hank Davis brings to bear cutting edge research from the cognitive sciences to reveal how mental tools designed to serve the needs of our ancient ancestors continue to exert an influence, both subtle and powerful, on human thought and behavior today," said John Teehan, Associate Professor of Religion, Hofstra University and author of In the Name of God: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Ethics and Violence.

Davis says Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World is the product of more than two decades of pondering, teaching and writing about "the powerful influence of irrational, delusional thinking that is anchored to our Pleistocene-era brain circuitry." He asserts that much of this primitive thinking is supported by modern social institutions. For example, a 2007 poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans believe angels and demons are active forces in the world, while a 2009 survey concluded that only 39 percent believe in Darwin's theory of evolution. Even non-religious persons often thank God or "the heavens" in response to good news.

"Ways of thinking that were both reasonable and advantageous in caveman days become illogical—and potentially destructive—when they are overextended to modern times," says Madeleine Van Hecke, author of Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things (Amazon.com, $13.59).

Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Amazon.com, $17.15) adds, "Hank Davis reveals the deep roots of humanity's weakness for superstitions, blind assumptions and primitive thinking, and shows how we can start to overcome 'caveman logic.'"

Davis advocates a world in which "spirituality" is viewed as a dangerous rather than an admirable quality, and suggests ways in which we can overcome our innate predisposition toward irrationality. Davis points out that, "biology is not destiny." Just as some of us succeed in watching our diets, resisting violent impulses, and engaging in unselfish behavior, we can learn to use critical thinking and the insights of science to guide individual effort and social action in the service of our whole species.

A flurry of recent research has documented that talking on a cell phone poses a dangerous distraction for drivers and others whose attention should be focused elsewhere. Now, a new study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology finds that just the ring of a cell phone may be equally distracting, especially when it comes in a classroom setting or includes a familiar song as a ringtone. "In any setting where people are trying to acquire knowledge and trying to retain that information in some way, a distraction that may just seem like a common annoyance to people may have a really disruptive effect on their later retention of that information," said the study's lead author, Jill Shelton, a postdoctoral psychology fellow in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

The study includes an experiment in which Shelton poses as a student seated in the middle of a crowded undergraduate psychology lecture and allows a cell phone in her handbag to continue ringing loudly for about 30 seconds. Students tested later scored about 25 percent worse for recall of course content presented during the distraction, even though the same information was covered by the professor just prior to the phone ring and projected as text in a slide show shown throughout the distraction. Students scored even worse when Shelton added to the disturbance by frantically searching her handbag as if attempting to find and silence her ringing phone. "Many of us consider a cell phone ringing in a public place to be an annoying disruption, but this study confirms that these nuisance noises also have real-life impacts," Shelton said. "These seemingly innocuous events are not only a distraction, but they have a real influence on learning."

Titled "The distracting effects of a ringing cell phone: An investigation of the laboratory and the classroom setting," the study was conducted at Louisiana State University, where Shelton received her doctoral degree. Her co-authors in the LSU psychology department include Emily Elliott, Sharon Eaves and Amanda Exner. The study explores cognitive differences in how we respond to auditory distractions, specifically whether we process these interruptions using a voluntary, top-down, executive-level shift in attention or as a more reflexive, automatic and involuntary reorientation of attention. Perhaps most surprising, the study found that unexpected exposure to snippets of a popular song, such as those often used as ringtones, can have an even-longer-lasting negative impact on attention.

In this phase of the experiment, students in a laboratory were tested on simple word-recognition tasks while exposed to a range of auditory distractions, including irrelevant tones, standard cell phone rings and parts of a song very familiar to most LSU students. The song, an instrumental version of the LSU fight song, was then being played incessantly around campus as LSU football made its fall 2007 run to the national college championship. The song also became a popular cell phone ringtone.

"When we played the fight song as part of our lab experiments, the distraction factor lasted longer," Shelton said. "It slowed down their decision-making performance for a longer time than even a standard ringtone." Thus, people who use popular songs as a personal ringtone may be increasing the odds their cell phone rings will be more distracting. "Depending on how familiar people are with these songs, it could lead to an even worse impairment in their cognitive performance," she said.

The study raises concerns for people who attempt to concentrate while being bombarded by beeps and buzzes from incoming email or text messages. Findings suggest the potential for distraction is greater if the ring tone has some special meaning or personal relevance, such as a custom tone that identifies a call as coming from a parent, close friend or boss at work. On the bright side, students in repeated trials of the experiment eventually were able to block the distracting effects of both standard and song-based cell phone rings, gradually reducing cognitive impairment caused by them. "There's definitely some evidence to suggest that people can become habituated to a distracting noise," Shelton said. "If you're in an office where the phones are just ringing all the time everyday, it may initially be distracting to you, but you will probably get over it." While these findings have plenty of real world implications, they also shed light on whether a voluntary or involuntary model best describes cognitive lapses caused by nuisance noises.

Recent research has shown that talking on a cell phone while driving results in serious consequences, such as slower braking responses and increased risks of running red lights and collisions — effects attributed to phone conversation absorbing important voluntary attentional resources needed to respond to information in the driving field. The unexpected ringing of a phone, on the other hand, might be explained using the involuntary model, one that views our response as a more automatic, almost reflexive re-orienting of attentional resources, and a process over which we have little control. Shelton suggests that our response to a ringing cell phone may involve a combination of these cognitive responses depending on the situation and whether the ring is unexpected. In one of her lab experiments, she found that participants who were warned about the potential for distraction were able to recover more quickly and moderate their levels of cognitive impairment. "Our experiments suggest that there is a benefit to prior knowledge in how we respond to nuisance noises," Shelton said. "It doesn't mean you won't experience a disruption to what you were doing for that brief period, but your cognitive system can adjust and get back on task fairly quickly."

Cell phones are a danger on the road in more ways than one. Two new studies show that talking on the phone while traveling, whether you're driving or on foot, is increasing both pedestrian deaths and those of drivers and passengers, and recommend crackdowns on cell use by both pedestrians and drivers. The new studies, lead-authored by Rutgers University, Newark, Economics Professor Peter D. Loeb, relate the impact of cell phones on accident fatalities to the number of cell phones in use, showing that the current increase in deaths attributed to cell phone use follows a period when cell phones actually helped to reduce pedestrian and traffic fatalities. However, this reduction in fatalities disappeared once the numbers of phones in use reached a "critical mass" of 100 million, the study found.

These studies looked at cell phone use and motor vehicle accidents from 1975 through 2002, and factored in a number of variables, including vehicle speed, alcohol consumption, seat belt use, and miles driven.

The studies found the cell phone-fatality correlation to be true even when weighing in factors such as speed, alcohol consumption, and seat belt use.

Loeb and his co-author determined that, at the current time, cell phone use has a "significant adverse effect on pedestrian safety" and that "cell phones and their usage above a critical threshold adds to motor vehicle fatalities." In the late 1980s and part of the 1990s, before the numbers of phones exploded, cell phone use actually had a "life-saving effect" in pedestrian and traffic accidents, Loeb notes. "Cell-phone users' were able to quickly call for medical assistance when involved in an accident. This quick medical response actually reduced the number of traffic deaths for a time," Loeb hypothesizes.

However, this was not the case when cells were first used in the mid-1980s, when they caused a "life-taking effect" among pedestrians, drivers and passengers in vehicles. In those early days, when there were fewer than a million phones, fatalities increased, says Loeb, because drivers and pedestrians probably were still adjusting to the novelty of using them, and there weren't enough cell phones in use to make a difference in summoning help following an accident, he explains.

The "life-saving effect" occurred as the volume of phones grew into the early 1990s, and increasing numbers of cells were used to call 911 following accidents, leading to a drop in fatalities, explains Loeb. But this life-saving effect was canceled out once the numbers of phones reached a "critical mass" of about 100 million and the "life-taking effect" – increased accidents and fatalities -- outweighed the benefits of quick access to 911 services, according to Loeb.

"The cell phone effect on pedestrian fatalities" (Transportation Research Part E, Elsevier, Vol. 45, Issue 1, January 2009, with William A. Clarke, Bentley University, Waltham, MA,) looked at pedestrian fatalities related to cell phone use; the still-to-be-released "The impact of cell phones and BAC Laws on Motor Vehicle Fatality Rates" (Applied Economics, Loeb, Clarke and Richard Anderson, New Jersey City University), examines all cell-related traffic fatalities. Loeb and his co-authors used econometric models to analyze data from a number of government and private studies, including those by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Department of Transportation, MADD, and the U.S. Census Bureau, among others.

He and his co-authors recommend that governments consider more aggressive policies to reduce cell phone use by both drivers and pedestrians, to reduce the number of fatalities.

Bluetooth device also blocks texting when key is in ignition

University of Utah researchers have developed an automobile ignition key that prevents teenagers from talking on cell phones or sending text messages while driving. The university has obtained provisional patents and licensed the invention – Key2SafeDriving – to a private company that hopes to see it on the market within six months at a cost of less than $50 per key plus a yet-undetermined monthly service fee.

"The key to safe driving is to avoid distraction," says Xuesong Zhou, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering who co-invented the system with Wally Curry, a University of Utah graduate now practicing medicine in Hays, Kan. "We want to provide a simple, cost-effective solution to improve driving safety." Zhou notes that "at any given time, about 6 percent of travelers on the road are talking on a cell phone while driving. Also at any given time, 10 percent of teenagers who are driving are talking or texting." Studies have shown drivers using cell phones are about four times more likely to get in a crash than other drivers. "As a parent, you want to improve driving safety for your teenagers," he says. "You also want to reduce your insurance costs for your teen drivers. Using our system you can prove that teen drivers are not talking while driving, which can significantly reduce the risk of getting into a car accident."

If things go as planned, the Key2SafeDriving system won't be sold directly to consumers by a manufacturer, but instead the technology may be licensed to cell phone service providers to include in their service plans, says Ronn Hartman, managing partner of Accendo LC. The Kaysville, Utah, company provides early stage business consulting and "seed funding." It has licensed the Key2SafeDriving technology from the University of Utah and is working to manufacture and commercialize it.

Hartman envisions gaining automobile and insurance industry backing so that Key2SafeDriving data on cell phone use (or non-use) while driving can be compiled into a "safety score" and sent monthly to insurance companies, which then would provide discounts to motorists with good scores. The score also could include data recorded via Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites on the driver's speeding, rapid braking or running of lights, which are calculated by comparing the driver's position with a database of maps, speed limits, stop lights and so on.

How Key2SafeDriving Works
The system includes a device that encloses a car key – one for each teen driver or family member. The device connects wirelessly with each key user's cell phone via either Bluetooth or RFID (radio-frequency identification) technologies. To turn on the engine, the driver must either slide the key out or push a button to release it. Then the device sends a signal to the driver's cell phone, placing it in "driving mode" and displaying a "stop" sign on the phone's display screen.

While in driving mode, teen drivers cannot use their cell phones to talk or send text messages, except for calling 911 or other numbers pre-approved by the parents – most likely the parents' own cell numbers. Incoming calls and texts are automatically answered with a message saying, "I am driving now. I will call you later when I arrive at the destination safely." When the engine is turned off, the driver slides the key back into the device, which sends a "car stopped" signal to the cell phone, returning it to normal communication mode. The device can't be "tricked" by turning the phone off and on again because the phone will receive the "driving mode" signal whenever the car key is extended.

Adult drivers cannot text or use a handheld cell phone, but the Key2SafeDriving system does allow them to talk using a hands-free cell phone – even though studies by University of Utah psychologists indicate hands-free phones are just as distracting as handheld phones. Curry agrees that driving while talking on any cell phone "is not safe," but he says the inventors have to face the practical issue of whether adults would buy a product to completely block their cell phone use while driving. Limiting some cell calls by adults "is a step in the right direction," he says. Zhou says the goal for adults is to improve safety by encouraging them to reduce the time they spend talking while driving. The encouragement could come in the form of insurance discounts by insurers, who would receive monthly scores from Key2SafeDriving showing how well an adult driver avoided talking while driving.

An Invention is Born
The new invention began with Curry, a Salt Lake City native who graduated from the University of Utah with an accounting degree and premedical training in 1993. He returned from the Medical College of Wisconsin for his surgical residency in urology at University Hospital during 1998-2003. He now is a urologist in Hays, Kan.

His concern with driving-while-talking began because, as a doctor, "the hospital is calling me all the time on my cell phone when I'm driving." One day while driving home, he saw a teenage girl texting while driving, making him worry about his 12- and 14-year-old daughters, who are approaching driving age. "I thought, this is crazy, there has got to be something to stop this, because not only is she putting people at risk, but so was I," Curry says. "It struck me pretty hard that something should be done."

Curry's initial idea was a GPS system to detect a moving cell phone and disable it when it moved at driving speeds. Meanwhile, someone else developed a similar system based on the same idea. But it cannot distinguish if the cell phone user is driving a car or is a passenger in a moving car, bus or train – a problem overcome by Key2SafeDriving.

In early 2008, Curry called Larry Reaveley, a civil engineering professor at the University of Utah, who suggested Curry contact Zhou, a specialist in "intelligent" transportation systems. Zhou and Curry then came up with the idea of blocking cell phone usage via a vehicle ignition key. Zhou, a native of Liuzhou, China, joined the University of Utah faculty in early 2007. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Maryland in 2004. He has worked for a California company that sold a product that provides traffic information to motorists using GPS satellites.

A short video about Key2SafeDriving may be viewed at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEIMUsnvucE
Video credit: Ana Antunes, University of Utah

The video and additional information about Key2SafeDriving are available at:
http://www.Key2SafeDriving.net

Passenger reacts to traffic, unlike person at other end of cell conversation    
        
Drivers are far more distracted by talking on a cellular phone than by conversing with a passenger in an automobile, according to a new study by University of Utah psychologists Frank Drews, David Strayer and Monisha Pasupathi.

The study, which used a sophisticated driving simulator, found that when drivers talk on a cell phone, they drift out of their lanes and missed exits more frequently than drivers conversing with a passenger. The findings are being released Monday, Dec. 1 by the American Psychological Association and published in the Dec. 15, 2008, issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

"The passenger adds a second set of eyes, and helps the driver navigate and reminds them where to go," says Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah and a co-author of the study. Previous studies by Strayer and Drews have found that hands-free cell phones are just as distracting as handheld models because the conversation is the biggest distraction. They also have shown that when young adults talk on cell phones while driving, their reaction times become as slow as reaction times for senior citizens, and that drivers talking on cell phones are as impaired as drivers with the 0.08 percent blood alcohol level that defines drunken driving in most states.

Strayer says he often is asked about the distraction caused by conversations with passengers versus people on the other end of a cell phone, "because in both cases you have a conversation." But "when you take a look at the data, it turns out that a driver conversing with a passenger is not as impaired a driver talking on a cell phone," he says. "You see bigger lane deviations for someone talking on a cell phone compared with a driver talking to a passenger. You also find when there is a passenger in the car, almost everyone takes the exit. But half the people talking on the cell phone fail to take the exit."

Drews concludes: "Friends don't talk to their driving friends on cell phones." Strayer adds: "The difference between a cell phone conversation and passenger conversation is due to the fact that the passenger is in the vehicle and knows what the traffic conditions are like, and they help the driver by reminding them of where to take an exit and pointing out hazards."

A neural link between intelligence and self-control

If you had a choice between receiving $1,000 right now or $4,000 ten years from now, which would you pick? Psychologists use the term "delay discounting" to describe our inability to resist the temptation of a smaller immediate reward in lieu of receiving a larger reward at a later date. Discounting future rewards too much is a form of impulsivity, and an important way in which we can neglect to exert self-control.

Previous research suggests that higher intelligence is related to better self-control, but the reasons for this link are unknown. Psychologists Noah A. Shamosh and Jeremy R. Gray, from Yale University, and their colleagues, were interested in testing the idea that certain brain regions supporting short-term memory play a critical role in this relationship. "It has been known for some time that intelligence and self-control are related, but we didn't know why. Our study implicates the function of a specific brain structure, the anterior prefrontal cortex, which is one of the last brain structures to fully mature," said Dr. Shamosh.

In this study, 103 healthy adults were presented with a delay discounting task to assess self-control: a series of hypothetical choices where they had to choose between two financial rewards, a smaller one which they would receive immediately or another, larger reward which would be received at a later time. The participants then underwent a variety of tests of intelligence and short term memory. On another day, subjects' brain activity was measured using fMRI, while they performed additional short-term memory tasks.

The results show that participants with the greatest activation in the brain region known as the anterior prefrontal cortex also scored the highest on intelligence tests and exhibited the best self-control during the financial reward test. This was the only brain region to show this relation. The results appear in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Previous studies have shown that the anterior prefrontal cortex plays a role in integrating a variety of information. The authors suggest that greater activity in the anterior prefrontal cortex helps people not only to manage complex problems, resulting in higher intelligence, but also aids in dealing with simultaneous goals, leading to better self-control.

Knowledge of the neural mechanisms underlying the relationship between short term memory, intelligence and delay discounting may result in improved techniques of increasing self-control. This is particularly applicable in regulating behavior related to gambling and substance abuse. "Understanding the factors that support better self-control is relevant to a host of important behaviors, ranging from saving for retirement to maintaining physical and mental health," the authors conclude.

Rofé, Yacov (2008). Does repression exist? Memory, pathogenic, unconscious and clinical evidence. Review of General Psychology, 12 (1), 63-85.

Abstract: The current dispute regarding the existence of repression has mainly focused on whether people remember or forget trauma. Repression, however, is a multidimensional construct, which, in addition to the memory aspect, consists of pathogenic effects on adjustment and the unconscious. Accordingly, in order to arrive at a more accurate decision regarding the existence of repression, studies relevant to all three areas are reviewed. Moreover, since psychoanalysis regards repression as a key factor in accounting for the development and treatment of neurotic disorders, relevant research from these two domains are also taken into account. This comprehensive evaluation reveals little empirical justification for maintaining the psychoanalytic concept of repression. (emphasis added)

Brain imaging reveals drivers are distracted even if they don't talk

Carnegie Mellon University scientists have shown that just listening to a cell phone while driving is a significant distraction, and it causes drivers to commit some of the same types of driving errors that can occur under the influence of alcohol. The use of cell phones, including dialing and texting, has long been a safety concern for drivers. But the Carnegie Mellon study, for the first time, used brain imaging to document that listening alone reduces by 37 percent the amount of brain activity associated with driving. This can cause drivers to weave out of their lane, based on the performance of subjects using a driving simulator.

The findings, to be reported in an upcoming issue of the journal Brain Research, show that making cell phones hands-free or voice-activated is not sufficient in eliminating distractions to drivers. “Drivers need to keep not only their hands on the wheel; they also have to keep their brains on the road,” said neuroscientist Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. Other distractions, such as eating, listening to the radio or talking with a passenger, also can divert a driver. Though it is not known how these activities compare to cell phone use, Just said there are reasons to believe cell phones may be especially distracting. “Talking on a cell phone has a special social demand, such that not attending to the cell conversation can be interpreted as rude, insulting behavior,” he noted. A passenger, by contrast, is likely to recognize increased demands on the driver’s attention and stop talking.

The 29 study volunteers used a driving simulator while inside an MRI brain scanner. They steered a car along a virtual winding road at a fixed, challenging speed, either while they were undisturbed, or while they were deciding whether a sentence they heard was true or false. Just’s team used state-of-the-art functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods to measure activity in 20,000 brain locations, each about the size of a peppercorn. Measurements were made every second.

The driving-while-listening condition produced a 37 percent decrease in activity of the brain’s parietal lobe, which is associated with driving. This portion of the brain integrates sensory information and is critical for spatial sense and navigation. Activity was also reduced in the occipital lobe, which processes visual information. The other impact of driving-while-listening was a significant deterioration in the quality of driving. Subjects who were listening committed more lane maintenance errors, such as hitting a simulated guardrail, and deviating from the middle of the lane. Both kinds of influences decrease the brain’s capacity to drive well, and that decrease can be costly when the margin for error is small.

“The clear implication is that engaging in a demanding conversation could jeopardize judgment and reaction time if an atypical or unusual driving situation arose,” Just said. “Heavy traffic is no place for an involved personal or business discussion, let alone texting.” Because driving and listening draw on two different brain networks, scientists had previously suspected that the networks could work independently on each task. But Just said this study demonstrates that there is only so much that the brain can do at one time, no matter how different the two tasks are.

The study emerges from the new field of neuroergonomics, which combines brain science with human-computer interaction studies that measure how well a technology matches human capabilities. Neuroergonomics is beginning to be applied to the operation of vehicles like aircraft, ships and cars in which drivers now have navigation systems, iPods and even DVD players at their disposal. Every additional input to a driver consumes some of his or her brain capacity, taking away some of the resources that monitor for other vehicles, lane markers, obstacles, and sudden changes in conditions.

“Drivers’ seats in many vehicles are becoming highly instrumented cockpits,” Just said, “and during difficult driving situations, they require the undivided attention of the driver’s brain.”

Longer commutes due to fewer lane changes, slower speeds

Motorists who talk on cell phones drive slower on the freeway, pass sluggish vehicles less often and take longer to complete their trips, according to a University of Utah study that suggests drivers on cell phones congest traffic.

“At the end of the day, the average person’s commute is longer because of that person who is on the cell phone right in front of them,” says University of Utah psychology Professor Dave Strayer, leader of the research team. “That SOB on the cell phone is slowing you down and making you late.”

“If you talk on the phone while you’re driving, it’s going to take you longer to get from point A to point B, and it’s going to slow down everybody else on the road,” says Joel Cooper, a doctoral student in psychology.

Cooper is scheduled to present the study in Washington on Wednesday, Jan. 16 during the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting. The board is part of the National Academies, parent organization of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine.

Cooper and Strayer conducted the study with Ivana Vladisavljevic, a doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering, and Peter Martin, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the University of Utah Traffic Lab. Martin says that, combined with Strayer’s previous research, the new study shows “cell phones not only make driving dangerous, they cause delay too.” [read more]

Bored? Don't blame your job, the traffic or your mindless chores. Battling boredom, researchers say, means finding focus, living in the moment and having something to live for.

Anna Gosline || Scientific American Mind || December 2007

Albert Ellis, who developed Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), died on 24 July 2007 at the age of 93. He will be greatly missed.

Albert Ellis Institute's Tribute
Ellis' last interview at Prospect

Brown, A.M (2007). A cognitive approach to dogmatism: An investigation into the relationship of verbal working memory and dogmatism. Journal of Research in Personality, 41 (4), 946-952.

Abstract: This study investigated the relationship of working memory to open and closed belief systems. Two hundred college students completed a working memory span test to measure verbal working memory, and Rokeach’s Dogmatism Scale (1956). Regression analysis was undertaken to determine the contribution of verbal working memory to dogmatism. A negative correlation was found between dogmatism scores and working memory scores (p = .002) confirming the hypothesis that those participants who display a larger working memory capacity would show lower levels of dogmatic beliefs than participants displaying a smaller working memory capacity. Error analysis was employed to determine the significance of inhibition processes; indicating that capacity limits in verbal working memory, and not processing deficits, were primarily responsible for poor working memory scores. Dogmatism was not found to be related to gender, age, ethnicity, religious affiliation, academic major, or level of education.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say that practicing even small doses of daily meditation may improve focus and performance.

Meditation, according to Penn neuroscientist Amishi Jha and Michael Baime, director of Penn's Stress Management Program, is an active and effortful process that literally changes the way the brain works. Their study is the first to examine how meditation may modify the three subcomponents of attention, including the ability to prioritize and manage tasks and goals, the ability to voluntarily focus on specific information and the ability to stay alert to the environment.

In the Penn study, subjects were split into two categories. Those new to meditation, or "mindfulness training," took part in an eight-week course that included up to 30 minutes of daily meditation. The second group was more experienced with meditation and attended an intensive full-time, one-month retreat.

Researchers found that even for those new to the practice, meditation enhanced performance and the ability to focus attention. Performance-based measures of cognitive function demonstrated improvements in a matter of weeks. The study, published in the journal Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, suggests a new, non-medical means for improving focus and cognitive ability among disparate populations and has implications for workplace performance and learning.

Participants performed tasks at a computer that measured response speeds and accuracy. At the outset, retreat participants who were experienced in meditation demonstrated better executive functioning skills, the cognitive ability to voluntarily focus, manage tasks and prioritize goals. Upon completion of the eight-week training, participants new to meditation had greater improvement in their ability to quickly and accurately move and focus attention, a process known as "orienting." After the one-month intensive retreat, participants also improved their ability to keep attention "at the ready."

The results suggest that meditation, even as little as 30 minutes daily, may improve attention and focus for those with heavy demands on their time. While practicing meditation may itself may not be relaxing or restful, the attention-performance improvements that come with practice may paradoxically allow us to be more relaxed.

An interview with Albert Ellis, developer of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). The groundbreaking treatment rests on the premise that most of our emotional problems are based on irrational beliefs.

Although intelligence is generally thought to play a key role in children's early academic achievement, aspects of children's self-regulation abilities—including the ability to alternately shift and focus attention and to inhibit impulsive responding--are uniquely related to early academic success and account for greater variation in early academic progress than do measures of intelligence. Therefore, in order to help children from low-income families succeed in school, early school-age programs may need to include curricula designed specifically to promote children's self-regulation skills as a means of enhancing their early academic progress.

Those are the findings of a new study conducted by researchers at the Pennsylvania State University and published in the March-April 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.

Although there is currently a focus on teaching specific content and factual information in pre-kindergarten and early elementary education, these findings indicate that without a simultaneous focus on promoting self-regulation skills, many children are likely to struggle to keep pace with the academic demands of the early elementary classroom.

The study examined the role of self-regulation in emerging academic ability in 141 3- to 5-year-old children from low-income homes who attended Head Start, the federal preschool program for children living in poverty. The researchers sought to determine the extent to which distinct but overlapping aspects of children's developing self-regulation (cognitive, social-emotional, and temperament-based) are associated with emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten.

The researchers found that all aspects of children's self-regulation are uniquely related to their academic abilities, over and above their intelligence. They also found that one particular aspect of self-regulation—termed the inhibitory control aspect of brain function used in planning, problem solving, and goal-directed activity—is predictive of all academic outcomes but was particularly associated with early ability in math.

"Children's ability to regulate their thinking and behavior develops rapidly in the preschool years," according to Clancy Blair, associate professor of human development and family studies at the Pennsylvania State University and lead author of the study. "By the time children start school, they are expected to be able to sufficiently regulate attention, impulsivity, and emotion so as to communicate effectively and to jointly engage in learning experiences with teachers and classmates.

"For some children, however, particularly children from low-income homes or facing early adversity, self-regulation abilities may be slow in developing, leading to problems in the transition to school and increased risk for early school failure. In the attempt to improve educational achievement and decrease inequities in educational progress associated with socioeconomic status, it is important to understand the nature of multiple influences on early progress in school."

What is the very best way to learn a complex task? Is it practice, practice, practice, or is watching and thinking enough to let you imitate a physical activity, such as skiing or ballet? A new study from Brandeis University published this week in the Journal of Vision unravels some of the mysteries surrounding how we learn to do things like tie our shoes, feed ourselves, or perform dazzling dance steps.

"What makes one person clumsy and the next person a prima ballerina is a combination of talent and practice," explains study co-author Robert Sekuler a neuroscientist at Brandeis" Volen Center for Complex Systems. "We are trying to determine what strategies will optimize imitation learning, which is crucial for acquiring many of the skills used in daily life. A lot of what we do we learn by watching and imitating others."

The study provides a first detailed look into explicit learning of sequential, non-verbal material. While many studies have evaluated serial recall of words, researchers have paid little attention to imitation learning, even though such learning is crucial to just about everything we do, from sports to regaining mobility after a stroke or accident.

"This study demonstrates that we can learn much better just by watching than previously thought, but it also suggests that there is more than meets the eye," says Yigal Agam, a neuroscience graduate student and study co-author. "Next we need to really understand how to optimize non-verbal imitative learning—to make that learning as fast, easy and painless as possible."

The study evaluated participants" ability to view, remember and then reproduce a complex sequence of motions generated by the random, unpredictable movements of a disc. Even a single repetition of a motion sequence substantially reduced errors in reproduction. To test how important it was to actually reproduce the motion, Sekuler and his colleagues compared the participants" performance when they reproduced the motion after each viewing to when they did so only once, after the final viewing, and otherwise just carefully observed and thought about the motion. Interestingly, performance was the same. Seeing the motion, without actually imitating it, was enough to learn it.

But leveraging a learner"s attention to the task at hand is also critically important. "It"s not simply a question of information falling on the retina—this kind of learning is a skill of acquiring information, transforming it into output, which is the imitation," says Agam.

Several strategies may help leverage a learner"s attention and motivate imitative learning. Organizing the motor skill practice is key. For example, Sekuler, an expert on the neural and cognitive terrain of visual memory, says that breaking down a behavioral sequence into chunks can aid imitation learning, just as chunking can help us memorize a string of seemingly unrelated digits or other material. Agam and Sekuler have their sights set on identifying strategies that teachers and coaches could use to make complex actions more "chunkable," and therefore easier to imitate.

For example, to promote chunking (and learning), a complex behavior can be paused at just the right time, which will help the novice viewer more easily appreciate and imitate the separate components of that behavior. The researchers" long-term goal is to devise simple methods that will allow teachers and coaches to take any arbitrary complex action that they want to teach—like that series of dance steps or that perfect golf swing, and then re-package that action into components that make for optimal learning.

Many people think they can safely drive while talking on their cell phones. Vanderbilt neuroscientists Paul E. Dux and René Marois have found that when it comes to handling two things at once, your brain, while fast, isn't that fast.

"Why is it that with our incredibly complex and sophisticated brain, with 100 billion neurons processing information at rates of up to a thousand times a second, we still have such a crippling inability to do two tasks at once?" Marois, associate professor of Psychology, asked. "For example, what is it about our brain that gives us such a hard time at being able to drive and talk on a cell phone simultaneously?"

Researchers have long thought that a central "bottleneck" exists in the brain that prevents us from doing two things at once. Dux and Marois are the first to identify the regions of the brain responsible for this bottleneck, by examining patterns of neural activity over time. Their results were published in the Dec. 21 issue of Neuron.

"In our everyday lives, we seem to complete so many cognitive tasks effortlessly. However, we experience severe limitations when we try to do even two simple tasks at once, such as pressing a button when a visual stimulus appears and saying a word when a sound is presented. This is known as dual-task interference," Dux, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Psychology, said. "We were interested in trying to understand these limitations and in finding where in the brain this bottleneck might be taking place."

The research is particularly timely, as additional states consider banning the use of cell phones while driving. "While we are driving, we are bombarded with visual information. We might also be talking to passengers or talking on the phone," Marois said. "Our new research offers neurological evidence that the brain cannot effectively do two things at once. People think if they are using a headset with their cell phone while driving they are safe, but they're not because they are still doing two cognitively demanding tasks at once."

Identifying the information bottleneck responsible for this dual-task limitation required the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, an imaging technology that reveals the brain areas active in a given mental task by registering changes in oxygenated blood concentration in these regions. While fMRI is an excellent tool for identifying a particular area in the brain involved in a given task, it generally provides limited information about how that area responds over time.

To overcome this limitation, Dux and Marois rapidly sampled brain activity using fMRI while subjects were performing two demanding tasks. Evaluation of the data produced by this rapid sampling method allowed them to characterize the temporal pattern of activity in specific brain areas.

The two tasks consisted of pressing the appropriate computer key in response to hearing one of eight possible sounds and uttering an appropriate syllable in response to seeing one of eight possible images. Different senses and motor responses were enlisted in order to ensure that any interference between the two tasks was not specific to a particular sensory or motor modality, but instead originated at a central information-processing bottleneck.

The results revealed that the central bottleneck was caused by the inability of the lateral frontal and prefrontal cortex, and also the superior frontal cortex, to process the two tasks at once. Both areas have been shown in previous experiments to play a critical role in cognitive control.

"We determined these brain regions responded to tasks irrespective of the senses involved, they were engaged in selecting the appropriate response, and, most importantly, they showed 'queing' of neural activity--the neural response to the second task was postponed until the response to the first was completed," Dux said.

"Neural activity seemed to be delayed for the second task when the two tasks were presented nearly simultaneously – within 300 milliseconds of each other," Marois said. "If individuals have a second or more between tasks, we did not see this delay.

"This temporal delay is the essence of dual-task interference for tasks that require actions. By using time-resolved fMRI, we can see its signature in the brain," he continued. "These findings allow us to really now focus on this set of brain areas and to understand why these areas cannot process two tasks at once."

The researchers are interested in further exploring what is happening in the bottleneck to slow performance and believe the work may have future implications for people performing complex tasks. "It may be possible to look to the sort of tasks people are going to have to do in a very complex environment, such as flying a plane, and find out under what circumstances these tasks may be less vulnerable to dual-task interference," Dux added.

For the record, neither Marois nor Dux use their cell phones while driving. "I'm Australian, and it's illegal there, so I'm trained not to," Dux said. "Even so, I would never do it. Dual-task costs can be up to a second, and that's a long time when you're traveling at 60 miles per hour."

Why Does Cognitive Therapy Work?
By James Krehbiel

Don’t Talk to a Friend While Reading This; Multi-Tasking Adversely Affects the Brain’s Learning Systems, UCLA Scientists Report

Multi-tasking affects the brain's learning systems, and as a result, we do not learn as well when we are distracted, UCLA psychologists report this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Multi-tasking adversely affects how you learn," said Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. "Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily. Our study shows that to the degree you can learn while multi-tasking, you will use different brain systems.

"The best thing you can do to improve your memory is to pay attention to the things you want to remember," Poldrack added. "Our data support that. When distractions force you to pay less attention to what you are doing, you don't learn as well as if you had paid full attention."

Tasks that require more attention, such as learning calculus or reading Shakespeare, will be particularly adversely affected by multi-tasking, Poldrack said.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activity and function, a technique that uses magnetic fields to spot active brain areas by telltale increases in blood oxygen.

Participants in the study, who were in their 20s, learned a simple classification task by trial-and-error. They were asked to make predictions after receiving a set of cues concerning cards that displayed various shapes, and divided the cards into two categories. With one set of cards, they learned without any distractions. With a second set of cards, they performed a simultaneous task: listening to high and low beeps through headphones and keeping a mental count of the high-pitch beeps. While the distraction of the beeps did not reduce the accuracy of the predictions — people could learn the task either way — it did reduce the participants' subsequent knowledge about the task during a follow-up session.

When the subjects were asked questions about the cards afterward, they did much better on the task they learned without the distraction. On the task they learned with the distraction, they could not extrapolate; in scientific terms, their knowledge was much less "flexible."

This result demonstrates a reduced capacity to recall memories when placed in a different context, Poldrack said.

"Our results suggest that learning facts and concepts will be worse if you learn them while you're distracted," Poldrack said.

Different forms of memory are processed by separate systems in the brain, he noted.  When you recall what you did last weekend or try to remember someone's name or your driver's license number, you are using a type of memory retrieval called declarative memory. (Patients with Alzheimer disease have damage in these brain areas.) When you remember how to ride a bicycle or how to play tennis, you are using what is called procedural memory; this requires a different set of brain areas than those used for learning facts and concepts, which rely on the declarative memory system. The beeps in the study disrupted declarative memory, said Poldrack, who also studies how the types of memory are related.

The brain's hippocampus — a sea-horse-shaped structure that plays critical roles in processing, storing and recalling information — is necessary for declarative memory, Poldrack said. For the task learned without distraction, the hippocampus was involved. However, for the task learned with the distraction of the beeps, the hippocampus was not involved; but the striatum was, which is the brain system that underlies our ability to learn new skills.

The striatum is the brain system damaged in patients with Parkinson disease, Poldrack noted. Patients with Parkinson's have trouble learning new motor skills but do not have trouble remembering the past.

"We have shown that multi-tasking makes it more likely you will rely on the striatum to learn," Poldrack said. "Our study indicates that multi-tasking changes the way people learn."

The researchers noted that they are not saying never to multi-task, just don't multi-task while you are trying to learn something new that you hope to remember. Listening to music can energize people and increase alertness. Listening to music while performing certain tasks, such as exercising, can be helpful. But tasks that distract you while you try to learn something new are likely to adversely affect your learning, Poldrack said.

"Concentrate while you're studying," he said.


UCLA News
25 July 2006

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Somatization Disorder [abstract]
A Randomized Controlled Trial

Lesley A. Allen, PhD; Robert L. Woolfolk, PhD; Javier I. Escobar, MD; Michael A. Gara, PhD; Robert M. Hamer, PhD || Arch Intern Med 2006;166:1512-1518.

Background: Patients diagnosed as having somatization disorder (SD) who present with a lifetime history of multiple, medically unexplained physical symptoms represent a significant challenge to health care providers. To date, no psychotherapeutic or pharmacologic intervention has been found to produce clinically meaningful improvement in symptoms or functioning of patients with SD. We examined the efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for SD.

Methods:  Eighty-four participants meeting criteria for SD were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 conditions: (1) standard medical care augmented by a psychiatric consultation intervention or (2) a 10-session, manualized, individually administered CBT regimen added to the psychiatric consultation intervention. Assessments were conducted at baseline and 3, 9, and 15 months after baseline. The primary outcome measure was the severity scale of the Clinical Global Impression Scale for Somatization Disorder (CGI-SD). Secondary outcome measures were responder status as determined by clinical ratings, self-reported measures of physical functioning and somatic symptoms, and health care utilization assessed via medical records.

Results:  Fifteen months after baseline, somatization symptoms were significantly less severe in the group treated with CBT (0.84 points on the CGI-SD 7-point scale) (P<.001). Patients treated with CBT also were significantly more likely to be rated as either very much improved or much improved than patients treated with only augmented standard medical care (40% [n = 17] vs 5% [n = 2]). Cognitive-behavioral therapy was associated with greater improvements in self-reported functioning and somatic symptoms and a greater decrease in health care costs.
Author Affiliations: Department of Psychiatry, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway (Drs Allen, Escobar, and Gara); Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, Piscataway (Dr Woolfolk); Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ (Dr Woolfolk); and Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill (Dr Hamer).

Utah Psychologists Warn Against Cell Phone Use While Driving
Three years after the preliminary results first were presented at a scientific meeting and drew wide attention, University of Utah psychologists have published a study showing that motorists who talk on handheld or hands-free cellular phones are as impaired as drunken drivers.

29 June 2006

Do you think using a hands-free device makes it okay to talk on a cell phone while driving? Despite the well-intended laws requiring the use of hands-free devices, a driver's performance is impaired when distracted by even the simplest tasks, whether or not both hands are on the steering wheel.

Until now, the slowing of reaction time under multitasking conditions, referred to as the psychological-refractory-period (PRP) effect, has been studied mainly with simple tasks in laboratory settings. But a new research study presents a unique perspective of how the PRP effect pertains to driving, perhaps the most ubiquitous real-world task where non-optimal performance can have serious consequences.

EurekAlert
9 March 2006