Essays
-
Neural and Cognitive Plasticity - Mercado III, Eduardo
Modern humans spend much of their early lives participating in formal educational programs designed to increase their cognitive competencies. Despite this concerted effort to maximize individuals intellectual capacities, scientists and educators know relatively little about the neural factors that determine when and how learning experiences lead to improvements in cognitive abilities. Current theories of how brains are changed by learning focus on incremental adjustments to connections between neurons that are driven by increases in neural activity. This article summarizes past theoretical and experimental research on the relationship between neural plasticity and experience‐dependent changes in cognition, briefly describes recent technological advances in measuring and inducing brain plasticity mechanisms, and outlines key questions that researchers must address to provide a more complete understanding of the factors that enable people to learn new cognitive skills. Answering such questions will require the combined efforts of neuroscientists, psychologists, and educational researchers, as well as the development of new technologies for monitoring neural changes in humans and other animals as they learn to perform a variety of cognitive tasks. -
Multitasking - Irwin, Matthew
Multitasking has become increasingly prevalent, especially as we continue to incorporate more and more new media technologies into our daily activities. This essay first identifies trends in the availability and use of media devices in daily life and multitasking behaviors related to such trends. Second, given the general consensus that multitasking impairs performance outcomes, recent multitasking trends call for greater research attention to the subject. We outline the historical perspectives on cognitive structures and processes related to a human's general ability to multitask, culminating with the more recent threaded cognition theory. Third, we present two new research directions on multitasking. One is the exploration of long‐term consequences of multitasking behaviors, such as their impacts on cognitive functions, and dynamic changes in individuals' needs and multitasking behavioral changes over time; the other is a cognitive dimensional framework for defining multitasking, which may offer a means to reconcile findings across various multitasking research paradigms, and also to guide designs of multitasking technologies and environments. Finally, looking to the future, we propose several ways to advance the research on multitasking. -
Construal Level Theory and Regulatory Scope - Ledgerwood, Alison
Humans spend a large portion of their lives in pursuit of desired ends, from finding food and meeting deadlines to pursuing important career and relationship goals. The desired ends that people seek can vary in their proximity: For instance, food may be spatially close or distant; we might plan to meet a friend in the near or distant future. Thus, the ability to mentally support the pursuit of desired ends that are distant as well as close is essential for adaptive human functioning. This essay examines the basic mental processes that allow humans to contract and expand their regulatory scope in this functional way. A growing body of research suggests that different levels of psychological supports enable people to effectively pursue ends that can be closer or more distant. High‐level supports emphasize central and general aspects of an experience, and therefore tend to travel well—they can effectively guide action and interaction for the distant future, for remote locations, for unlikely scenarios, or with dissimilar others. Lower‐level supports emphasize specific, secondary, and unique aspects of an experience, and therefore support contractive scope—they help immerse people in the particular details of the current context to act effectively in the here and now. As the field moves forward, researchers are beginning to investigate how people expand and contract the scope of their social relationships in particular—an area of inquiry with important implications for understanding domains such as social communication and social learning that are central to human experience as social creatures.