A potential new clinical test of accelerated long-term forgetting

Patients with significant memory problems are assessed with a range of standard memory tests which generally demonstrate that, while the individual can retain the information for a few seconds or minutes, within half an hour, there has been substantial forgetting. However, a class of patients has recently been reported in the literature who pass these standard tests but complain of memory problems with the forgetting becoming obvious a few days or weeks later. This disorder has been termed 'Accelerated Long-Term Forgetting' or ALF and to date there is no clear clinical test to objectively demonstrate and quantify this phenomenon. In 2010, we published a single case study of a patient who shows a classic ALF profile and this new paper is a follow-up one in which we describe a memory test that we have developed that captures our patient's forgetting within an hour of first learning any information. This work came out of Terry McGibbon's Graduate Diploma dissertation and is potentially very important because due to time and financial constraints, most clinicians might see a patient only once rather than being able to reevaluate them a few days or weeks later. If our patient is representative of other ALF patients, then with this new test, a clinician can therefore test for forgetting within one clinical testing session. This may have significant implications for the patient’s diagnosis and subsequent treatment.

Ashok Jansari

Does drinking water help you Wii ?

Previous research has shown that cognitive performance declines in adults that are dehydrated. More recently, studies into the effects of water consumption have shown that cognitive performance improves in schoolchildren after having a drink. However, as this research area is still in its infancy, it is not yet possible to determine which cognitive skills are consistently sensitive to water consumption. Therefore, we did a small pilot study looking at the effect of water consumption in schoolchildren on a range of cognitive and motor skills. 

A group of 15 children between the ages of 8 and 9 years old were given tasks to complete on two occasions. On one occasion they were not given a drink and on the other occasion they were given a 250ml bottle of water to drink, twenty minutes before the testing began. In the ‘no water’ condition none of the children had a drink and in the ‘water’ condition 7 of the 15 children drank the entire 250ml of water whilst the rest drank varying amounts. The mean amount that they drank was 168ml. The children were tested in small groups of 3 or 4 and the conditions were counterbalanced. The children all completed a letter cancellation task, a ball catching task, step-ups and a Wii game. The Wii game called ‘Ravin Rabbids’ was a whack-a-mole style game in which the children had to whack a rabbit every time it stood up using a downward motion with the Wii control. The game required hand eye coordination skills.

The results showed that in the ‘water condition’ the children were less thirsty but no happier. In the letter cancellation task the children performed significantly better in the ‘water’ condition than the ‘no water’ condition; they correctly identified more targets. The children also got a significantly higher score in the ‘ Ravin Rabbids’ Wii game in the ‘water’ condition. There was no immediately apparent benefit of drinking water in the ball throwing and step-up tasks although exploratory analysis showed that children drinking more than 200ml of water did significantly better in the ball throwing and ‘Ravin Rabbid’ Wii game than those who drank less than 100ml. None of the children drank between 100 and 200ml of water.

The results show that children’s performance improves in tasks requiring motor skills and visual attention and these results are consistent with previous studies of school children. What is still to be determined is whether it is purely the motor skills, purely the visual attention, a combination of both or indeed some underlying skill such as speed of processing that is sensitive to water consumption.

This study was published in Education and Health and presented at the Natural Hydration Council annual meeting. There has also been some media interest and Caroline Edmonds has recently completed a round of radio interviews about the effects of water consumption in children.

Full article reference Booth, P., Taylor, B. and Edmonds, C. J. (2012) 'Water supplementation improves visual attention and fine motor skills in schoolchildren'. Education and Health, 30(3), pp. 75-79.

Paula Booth

Coaching in secondary education - training school students to become coaches

Dr Christian van Nieuwerburgh, Programme Leader for the MSc Coaching/Coaching Psychology programmes, has been invited as a guest keynote speaker to a well-respected international educational coaching conference in the US later this month. He will be speaking about his research into coaching in secondary education and the use of coaching in a broad range of educational settings. He is also leading a participative workshop on creating the context for “A-ha!” moments in coaching conversations. Due to interest from US educators, he has also been asked to deliver a full-day pre-conference workshop on “training high school students to become coaches”. Christian’s recently published book, Coaching in Education: Getting Better Results for Students, Educators, and Parents will be given out to nearly 250 delegates at the event.

 

For more information about the event:  http://instructionalcoach.org/conferences/details/seventh-annual-instructional-coaching-conference

 
To follow Christian on Twitter: @ChristianvN

British Identity, Knowledge of Countries, Intergroup Attitudes and Sport Participation of Newham Pupils in the Run-up to the 2012 Olympics

A study recently completed by Virginia Lam has been examining the national
identity, sports participation and knowledge about countries among primary
and secondary school children in East London in the run-up to the 2012 London
Olympics.

There is a surprising lack of systematic psychological research into the link
between group identity (including national identity such as Britishness) and
sport participation although it has been discussed by academics in other
disciplines. With the London Olympics looming, the sense of national
belonging among the British public has likely become heightened. This study
investigated Newham children's and adolescents' British and ethnic
self-identity, knowledge about in-(British) and out-group (foreign)
countries, and attitudes towards their people, competitive attitude and sport
participation in the year running up to the Games.

Over 400 pupils aged 5-15 years were tested using standardised measures.
Results show that strength of British identity declined towards later
childhood (from 8-9 years) whereas that of ethnic identity remained
relatively stable with age. Knowledge about countries shows improvement at
different ages depending on the knowledge domain (geography/emblems/civic).
Pupils' liking for, and stereotypes of, different nationalities did not
differ at age 5-6 years, but diverged from 8-9 years--if liking for different
nationalities converged again at age 14-15 years, when pupils stereotypes of
the groups were most different. Pupils showed increasingly negative
stereotypes of the British, but nevertheless preferred them as one of the
most liked groups, with age.

Both competitiveness and sport participation decreased with age, but the type
of activities they played varied as a function of age, gender (football
became vastly more popular than any other sport with age, particularly in
boys) and ethnicity (cricket was particularly popular among Asian pupils).
Pupils with lower family affluence reported the greatest discrepancy between
generic and actual participation, indicating they are afforded fewer
opportunities to play sport. Those with a stronger sense of British identity
tended to like the British more, but not necessarily also stereotype them
more positively nor like foreign groups less. These findings are discussed in
the light of follow-up research with the same pupils being planned for the
post-Olympic period (autumn 2012).

The preliminary findings (from primary school schools) had been presented as
a poster at the UEL Undergraduate Research Internship awards evening in
October 2011. The full study's initial findings were presented in an invited
talk by Virginia Lam at the Centre of Psychiatry, Queen Mary, in April 2012
and an abstract has been accepted for oral presentation at the BPS Annual
Conference of Developmental Psychology (Glasgow) in September 2012. The full
paper has been submitted to the British Journal of Developmental Psychology
and a non-technical report for schools is available through the Mega Event
Cities website (July 2012 archives):
http://megaeventcities.wordpress.com/home/.

Ginni

School Partnership Collaboration

Deirdre, Ginni and I met with Priya Clarke, the Schools Partnership Officer, to discuss whether the School of Psychology and Education and Community Partnerships could collaborate. Priya arranges for local schools to come and visit UEL as part as what was previously known as the Aim Higher Initiative. This was a government programme set up to try and engage and motivate local children to want to enter higher education. This programme is no longer funded but UEL continue to invite schoolchildren to the campus as part of a programme to build skills and raise aspirations. To find out more information see   http://www.uel.ac.uk/partnerships/index.htm.

Priya arranges for 10 primary school visits and 30 secondary school visits per year. Priya may also be able to establish a relationship between the researcher and the school, so that the researcher could go into school to collect data. Additionally, a summer school is held at UEL for a week during September from 10am till 2.30pm. Priya was very keen to enter into a relationship with the School of Psychology whereby we supply interesting and exciting workshops for the children and in return we are able to collect data for our studies.  A typical visit usually involves a University Workshop which Priya will run, a Campus Workshop which often the school of education runs and a Subject Workshop, which is where we come in. It would be a good idea if we could set up some activity workshops that could be used on a regular basis over the coming years. Each workshop requires a Duty Manager who will need to be on campus but is not required to be at the workshop and a couple of staff members, postgrads or students (who are CRB which Priya can arrange) who can run the workshops whilst data is being collected.

Priya spoke to Ginni, Deirdre and I in detail to discover what our individual data collection needs were. She is more than happy to speak to any other researchers who would like to be involved with this project or would like to collect data from children. Her email is p.clarke@uel.ac.uk. 

Ideas that I have had are: letting the children watch a film? in the Virtual Reality Suite; showing them some clips of cognitive paradigms such as counting the no. of times a team bounces a basketball whilst the monkey runs across the court, upside down faces etc; plastic brains to show the water content or even to reinact some of the classic studies (not Milgram or Zimbardo obviously) but maybe Asch and get some of the children to act as confederates. Anyway, as you can see I’m in need of some good ideas so if you would like to get more involved or just suggest activities please get in contact.

Thanks

Paula

UEL Research Funding Blog

The Research and Development Support Team have announced a new blog, called UEL Research Funding.

This blog will replace the information sheets that were previously used to disseminate funding information and should act to give a more up-to-date set of information for those of you seeking such opportunities.

The blog allows you to sign up for an email notification service, which should prove invaluable.

Tom Dickins

Human Behavioural Diversity

I recently co-edited an edition of Philosophical Transactions B on the topic of Evolution and Human Behavioural Diversity.  The content of this issue is now freely available online at this link.

This issue directly arose from the foundation of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association, a history of which can be found at this link.

This issue should interest those of you who think about individual and group differences, and also your students.

Tom Dickins