Train your baby to grow up a genius? That is the idea behind a load of commercial stimulus materials such as the Disney Baby Einstein videos, books, flashcards, toys, and so on (seemingly anything marketable ). We have described these products on page 219 of the A2 Complete Companion, along with a study that showed that watching the DVDs can lead to a poorer developmental outcome. Now Disney is refunding the cost of the videos to anyone who purchased them!! The refunds are because a range of studies have shown that watching TV is potentially harmful for the under-2s, and linked early TV watching to attentional problems at around age 7. It would be interesting to know if the brain’s developing connections are affected by environmental input, something which has very tricky ethical issues but which might be abe to be done as a natural experiment. The emphasis on stimulating cognitive development is still on positive adult-child interactions.
Posts published during 2009
In November 2004 52 year old Diana Duyser from Florida USA, sold on e-bay a grilled cheese sandwich she had made ten years previously for $28,000 and in the process had 1.7 million hits to this particular e-bay item.
Why such interest in a frankly inedible piece of food? Well quite simply because there in the cheese toastie was the quite discernible face of the Virgin Mary and ever since the toasted treat had been in her possession, Ms.Duyser claimed to have had nothing but good luck.However this is not such an isolated incident. People have been seeing faces in all sorts Read the rest of this entry »
The Placebo Effect… the A02 point that just keeps getting bigger….
October 17, 2009 by Adrian Frost.
“Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late 90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, regulators might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 80s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time. It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.”
Read whole article here
Picture link here
I have assembled the latest statistics from all the Psychology exam boards showing the percentage passes for the June 2008 and June 2009 series. This document can be accessed here. You can view the JCQ statistics for all A levels here.Makes interesting reading … certainly challenges some of the assumptions teachers make about which boards are easiest – though to some extent this is influenced by the kind of students directed at the different boards.Any comments?
The suggested answers for the ‘Can You’ questions from Chapters 1-4 are now available (click the ‘book resources’ tab). At the moment the formatting has been lost but hopefully this will be resolved soon!
I have been sent a query about core and optional sleep as there is some contradiction between what we said in the 1st and 2nd editions of the A2 Complete Companion. Looking around the other A2 textbooks, there seems to be a wide variety of explanations – most of which are not correct. Jim Horne proposed the concepts of core and optional sleep as a different perspective to the REM/non-REM distinction, which means that it is not possible to say the core sleep includes or doesn’t include REM sleep. Horne’s concept was that core sleep is essentially the first hours of sleep, and thus refers to mainly slow wave sleep (SWS) but includes some REM sleep. As the night progresses there is less SWS sleep and more REM sleep. Optional sleep is the sleep that occurs later in the night and which appears to be less crucial. This consists mainly of REM sleep but has some SWS/non-REM sleep. I hope that is clear! Thanks to Jo Haycock for pointing the inconsistency out to me.
Someone (not me!) mistakenly included a claim on the back cover of the A2 Complete Companion that we would be supplying answers to the ‘Can You’ questions on this blog. We did not intend to do this – partly because it would be a mammoth task! But equally it would somehow defeat the purpose to give students ‘an answer’. The intention of the A2 ‘Can Yous’ was to help students break their essays down into do-able chunks drawing on the material on the spread. While this might be useful to provide answers at AS, we didn’t think we should be providing this for A2 students. Having said that we do intend to produce an A2 exam companion (one day) which will provide some answers.
Evidence Points To Conscious ‘Metacognition’ In Some Nonhuman Animals
September 18, 2009 by Adrian Frost.
(Link)
“For as long as IQ tests have existed, there has been a steady, progressive and ubiquitous improvement in the average scores people achieve at a given age, mainly because of a raising of the lower scores. On average, IQ is increasing by 3 per cent per decade. The effect is so strong that it implies that half of children in 1932, if given today’s tests, would score under 80 – the threshold for mental retardation.
Known as the Flynn Effect (after James Flynn), this phenomenon was initially dismissed as a result of changes in tests, or a reflection of better schooling. But the facts do not fit. Improvement is most marked in the types of test that relate least to educational content. Moreover, the effect is weakest in the cleverest children. It is a levelling-up phenomenon that results in a happy increase in equality.
After much agonising debate among psychologists, three explanations seem to make the most sense. The first is that (despite fast food) most children now get sufficient essential nutrients, vitamins, amino acids and oils to allow their Read the rest of this entry »
Tactile illusions: Seven ways to fool your sense of touch
September 7, 2009 by Adrian Frost.
Out of body experiences, scary rubber hands, kidding folk they have three arms, mind / body swaps……. I don’t know if this stuff is on the specification, but it should be, shouldn’t it?