The School of Design, Engineering & Computing Blog

Dr. Judith de Groot (Psychology Research Group) has recently published a textbook on environmental psychology (Environmental Psychology: An Introduction). See the flyer below for details.

As we get older there is typically a gradual decline across a range of cognitive abilities.  A major goal of recent research in ageing has been to examine how training in cognitive tasks might reduce or arrest cognitive decline.  Research examining the effects of cognitive training have taken place in the laboratory and have involved long, and often boring, training sessions several times a week making it difficult to see how they might be used effectively outside the lab.

Becky House and Siné McDougall asked older adults to use the Nintendo DS Brain Training program to see where or not there were any cognitive benefits from this commercially available package.  They asked one group of older adults (average age 74) to use the Nintendo DS regularly over a 6-week period (how often they used the Nintendo was automatically logged on the machine) and compared them to another group who were matched on education, computer experience, daily activities (time spent reading or watching television), and initial scores of Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.

What they found was that while some aspects of memory (short-term memory particularly) seemed to improve a little as a result of the training, the effects of the brain training were most marked in individuals who had reported a high quality of life and a positive evaluation of their own cognitive skills prior to starting the study.  What these findings suggest is that (i) brain training can have some limited positive effects on cognitive functioning as we get older but that (ii) the ease with which we learn using ‘brain training’ techniques may be determined to a much larger extent than we previously thought by our quality of life and our perceptions of our cognitive ability.

Reference: Siné McDougall & Becky House  (2012) Brain training in older adults: Evidence of transfer to memory span performance and pseudo-Matthew effects. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition,  iFirst, 1–27, http://www.psypress.com/anc

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825585.2011.640656

The Higher Education Academy’s first annual learning and teaching STEM conference will be held on the 12^th and 13^th of April (2012) at Imperial College, London. STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) are those recognised as having a strategic importance in higher education for the economy and employers.  Jacqui Taylor (Psychology Research Group) has been awarded a consultancy from the HEA to co-organise the Psychology stream of the STEM Annual Conference.  If anybody is interested in attending the conference, or would like to know more about how Psychology fits within STEM, Jacqui is happy to answer your questions (email: jtaylor@bournemouth.ac.uk).  More information about the conference can be found by clicking here.

Congratulations go to two members of the Psychology Research Group for their recent successful bids to the Santander Scholarship scheme. Lauren Kita, a PhD student in the group, won £2300 for attendance at the Sleep 2012 conference to be held a Brown University in Boston in June. Jane Elsley (Lecturer in Psychology) was awarded £890 for a research visit to the Universitat de les Illes Balears (Palma, Mallorca) to work with collaborators on a project exploring feature binding in visual short-term memory.  This success follows on from Simon Thompson’s earlier success in a previous round of the same scheme.

Well done all!

Congratulations are due to Dr. Jacqui Taylor of the Psychology Research Group who has just been appointed Editor of the BPS journal ‘Psychology Teaching Review’. The news comes as Jacqui stands down from a three year term as Chair of the BPS Division of Academics, Researchers and Teachers in Psychology. Well-done Jacqui!