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."

Alcohol and tobacco more harmful than cannabis and ecstacy.

A new study published in the Lancet proposes that drugs should be classified by the amount of harm that they do, rather than the sharp A, B, and C divisions in the UK Misuse of Drugs Act. The new ranking places alcohol and tobacco in the upper half of the league table. These socially accepted drugs were judged more harmful than cannabis, and substantially more dangerous than the Class A drugs LSD, 4-methylthioamphetamine and ecstasy.

Harmful drugs are currently regulated according to classification systems that purport to relate to the harms and risks of each drug. However, these are generally neither specified nor transparent, which reduces confidence in their accuracy and undermines health education messages.

Professor David Nutt from the University of Bristol, Professor Colin Blakemore, Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council, and colleagues, identified three main factors that together determine the harm associated with any drug of potential abuse:

   1. the physical harm to the individual user caused by the drug
   2. the tendency of the drug to induce dependence
   3. the effect of drug use on families, communities, and society

Within each of these categories, they recognized three components, leading to a comprehensive 9-category matrix of harm. Expert panels gave scores, from zero to three, for each category of harm for 20 different drugs. All the scores for each drug were combined to produce an overall estimate of its harm. In order to provide familiar benchmarks, for comparison with illicit drugs, five legal drugs of potential misuse (alcohol, khat, solvents, alkyl nitrites, and tobacco) and one that has since been classified (ketamine) were included in the assessment. The process proved simple, and yielded roughly similar scores for drug harm when used by two separate groups of experts.

Professor David Nutt, lead author on the paper, said: “Drug misuse and abuse are major health problems. Our methodology offers a systematic framework and process that could be used by national and international regulatory bodies to assess the harm of current and future drugs of abuse.”

Professor Colin Blakemore added: “Drug policy is primarily aimed at reducing the harm to individual users, their families and society. But at present there is no rational, evidence-based method for assessing the harm of drugs. We have tried to develop such a method. We hope that policy makers will take note of the fact that the resulting ranking of drugs differs substantially from their classification in the Misuse of Drugs Act and that alcohol and tobacco are judged more harmful than many illegal substances.”

Press release: 23 March 2007
University of Bristol

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.

Humans acquire fears using similar neural processes whether they’ve personally experienced an aversive event or only witnessed it, according to a study by researchers at New York University’s Departments of Psychology. This is the first study examining the brain basis of fears acquired indirectly, through the observation of others. The study shows that the amygdala, which is known to be critical to the acquisition and expression of fears from personal experience, is also involved during the acquisition and expression of fears obtained indirectly through social observation. The findings appear in the most recent issue of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN).

The research team, from the laboratory of NYU Professor Elizabeth Phelps, also includes Andreas Olsson, now a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Department of Psychology, and Katherine Nearing from NYU’s School of Medicine.

Previous research has shown how people develop fears after first-hand experience of an aversive event—getting stung by a bee or being burned by a hot pan. In acquiring these fears, a process known as fear conditioning, the brain’s amygdala plays a critical role. However, it’s unclear if fear conditioning can occur indirectly—that is, through social observation with no personal experience. It is also uncertain what neural processes take place in the acquisition of fears stemming from events or circumstances not experienced first-hand.

In this study, subjects witnessed a short video of another individual participating in a fear-conditioning experiment. In the video, subjects saw another person responding with distress when receiving mild electric shocks paired with a colored square. The subjects watching the video were then told they would take part in an experiment similar to the one they just viewed. Unlike the experiment in the video, these subjects never received shocks.

The results showed that the participants had a robust fear response when they were presented with the colored square that predicted electric shocks in the video, indicating that such a response resulted from merely observing—rather than directly experiencing—an aversive event. In addition, using brain imaging techniques, the researchers found that the amydgala response was equivalent with both when watching others receive a shock and when presented with the colored square that was previously paired with shock in the video. This finding demonstrates that similar neural systems are engaged when fears are learned through first-hand experience or by merely observing others.

"In our daily lives, we are frequently exposed to vivid images of others in emotional situations through personal social interactions as well as the media," explained Phelps. "The knowledge of somebody else’s emotional state may evoke empathic responses. However, as our results reveal, when others’ emotions are accompanied with vivid expressions and perceived as potentially relevant to our own future well being, we may engage additional learning mechanisms."

Olsson added: "In a way, learning by observing others’ emotional responses is like exploiting their expertise without being directly exposed to the potential risks associated with the direct learning. This seems a very adaptive thing to do for most social animals, which could explain why it is commonly seen across species. However, it remains to be explored in what way uniquely human social abilities contribute to learning fears through social observation."

A common drug [propranolol] administered in the first hours following trauma to patients deemed to be at risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) reduced the occurrence of PTSD, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Lille, France [in 2003].

While the study involved a small number of subjects, its results are encouraging, says its senior author, Charles Marmar, MD, associate chief of staff for mental health at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and professor and vice chair of psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco.

"The study is based on the new theory that PTSD is most likely to occur in patients who experience a particularly severe and prolonged response to trauma. If this model proves accurate after five or ten replications of studies like this one, it could have very profound ramifications. From a public health perspective, if you could identify the subgroup of people who are susceptible to PTSD, giving them this course of medication -- which is brief, very well tolerated and inexpensive -- could be very effective prevention [following major trauma] and may have great social relevance." The study appears in the November 1 issue of Biological Psychiatry. [read rest of article]

Also: The Memory Pill (60 Minutes video -- 26 Nov 2006)
Bad Memory? Wipe It Clean With New Pill (16 Jan 2006)