The power of feedback.

"Bouba" and "Kiki" in Namibia? A remote culture make similar shape-sound matches, but different shape-taste matches to Westerners.

Learning and Individual Differences

Should executive control, as indicated by working memory capacity (WMC) and mind-wandering propensity, help or hinder creativity? Sustained and focused attention should help guide a selective search of solution-relevant information in memory and help inhibit uncreative, yet accessible, ideas. However, unfocused attention and daydreaming should allow mental access to more loosely relevant concepts, remotely linked to commonplace solutions. Three individual-differences studies inserted incubation periods into 1 or 2 divergent thinking tasks and tested whether WMC (assessed by complex span tasks) and incubation-period mind wandering (assessed as probed reports of task-unrelated thought [TUT]) predicted postincubation performance. Retrospective self-reports of Openness (Experiment 2) and mind-wandering and daydreaming propensity (Experiment 3) complemented our thought-probe assessments of TUT. WMC did not correlate with creativity in divergent thinking, whereas only the questionnaire measure of daydreaming, but not probed thought reports, weakly predicted creativity; the fact that in-the-moment TUTs did not correlate with divergent creativity is especially problematic for claims that mind-wandering processes contribute to creative cognition. Moreover, the fact that WMC tends to strongly predict analytical problem solving and reasoning, but may not correlate with divergent thinking, provides a useful boundary condition for defining WMC’s nomological net. On balance, our data provide no support for either benefits or costs of executive control for at least 1 component of creativity.

Working memory capacity, mind wandering, and creative cognition: An individual-differences investigation into the benefits of controlled versus spontaneous thought

Environment as 'Brain Training': A review of geographical and physical environmental influences on cognitive ageing

Exposure to an urban environment alters the local bias of a remote culture.

Background 
Working memory (WM) is imperative for effective selective attention. Distractibility is greater under conditions of high (vs. low) concurrent working memory load (WML), and in individuals with low (vs. high) working memory capacity (WMC). In the current experiments, we recorded the flanker task performance of individuals with high and low WMC during low and high WML, to investigate the combined effect of WML and WMC on selective attention.

Methodology/Principal Findings
 
In Experiment 1, distractibility from a distractor at a fixed distance from the target was greater when either WML was high or WMC was low, but surprisingly smaller when both WML was high and WMC low. Thus we observed an inverted-U relationship between reductions in WM resources and distractibility. In Experiment 2, we mapped the distribution of spatial attention as a function of WMC and WML, by recording distractibility across several target-to-distractor distances. The pattern of distractor effects across the target-to-distractor distances demonstrated that the distribution of the attentional window becomes dispersed as WM resources are limited. The attentional window was more spread out under high compared to low WML, and for low compared to high WMC individuals, and even more so when the two factors co-occurred (i.e., under high WML in low WMC individuals). The inverted-U pattern of distractibility effects in Experiment 1, replicated in Experiment 2, can thus be explained by differences in the spread of the attentional window as a function of WM resource availability.

Conclusions/Significance
 
The current findings show that limitations in WM resources, due to either WML or individual differences in WMC, affect the spatial distribution of attention. The difference in attentional constraining between high and low WMC individuals demonstrated in the current experiments helps characterise the nature of previously established associations between WMC and controlled attention.

/pdf/focusing-on-attention-the-effects-of-working-memory-capacity-3nv9fj8nri.pdf

Focusing on Attention: The Effects of Working Memory Capacity and Load on Selective Attention

Higher education students’ perception of and level of engagement with the feedback they receive has gained increasing attention in the literature to identify areas which require educators’ attention. However, predictors of students' perception and engagement have yet to be identified. To address this, a survey measuring students’ views and practices regarding feedback was completed. Characteristics of the individual student (gender, age and whether English is their first language) the learning environment (student living on or off campus) and course related variables (year of study of the course and whether the second subject was the same or a different discipline) were analysed to assess whether these variables predict students’ perception and engagement with feedback. Multivariate analysis established that the only significant predictor variable was year of study of the course thus identifying a key predictor whilst ruling out numerous potential predictors. As the only significant predictor of students' relationship with feedback was their year of study, further analyses were conducted to establish which specific areas of perception of and engagement with feedback change as a function of this.

/pdf/identifying-predictors-of-students-perception-of-and-412ztxw514.pdf

Identifying predictors of students’ perception of and engagement with assessment feedback:

Selective attention to relevant targets has been shown to depend on the availability of working memory (WM). Under conditions of high WM load, processing of irrelevant distractors is enhanced. Here we showed that this detrimental effect of WM load on selective attention efficiency is reversed when the task requires global- rather than local-level processing. Participants were asked to attend to either the local or the global level of a hierarchical Navon stimulus while keeping either a low or a high load in WM. In line with previous findings, during attention to the local level, distractors at the global level produced more interference under high than under low WM load. By contrast, loading WM had the opposite effect of improving selective attention during attention to the global level. The findings demonstrate that the impact of WM load on selective attention is not invariant, but rather is dependent on the level of the to-be-attended information.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758%2Fs13414-012-0357-1.pdf

Working memory load can both improve and impair selective attention: evidence from the Navon paradigm.

Undergraduate students’ perception of feedback and level of engagement with the feedback they receive have gained increasing attention in the educational literature recently to identify areas which require educators’ attention. However, research in this area has generally been based on limited self-selecting samples, and has not considered how students’ relationship with feedback may alter depending on their year of study. To address this, a survey measuring students’ views and practices regarding feedback was completed at a higher education institution by 447 first-, second- and third-year psychology students, representing 77% of the cohort. Findings revealed that third years responded more negatively in both areas than their first- and second-year counterparts, whose ratings on these aspects themselves were far from optimal. These findings highlight the need for early interventions to improve students’ perception of and engagement with feedback in the earlier years, and to prevent the recorded deteriora...

/pdf/psychology-students-perception-of-and-engagement-with-pf4uhoqdps.pdf

Lubna Ahmed

Papers

Exposure to an urban environment alters the local bias of a remote culture.

Focusing on Attention: The Effects of Working Memory Capacity and Load on Selective Attention

Identifying predictors of students’ perception of and engagement with assessment feedback:

Working memory load can both improve and impair selective attention: evidence from the Navon paradigm.

Psychology students’ perception of and engagement with feedback as a function of year of study