Author and Lawyer Jeena Cho discussed some current research on mindfulness and cognitive flexibility with Dr. Minda for an article in Forbes magazine. Mindfulness meditation can help people to be more attentive to their own emotions, and by being aware of negative feelings as soon as they arise, people can engage in positive remediation rather than dwelling on the negative cognition. Read the entire Forbes article here.

Western News has a short article about our new research study underway with Jeena Cho. We’re looking at how mindfulness meditation affects lawyers. This is part of a larger stream of research in my lab where we’re examining mindfulness and cognition in the lab as well as in the workplace. We’ve got a similar study underway with 3M Canada as well….we’re hoping to have preliminary data in a few weeks. Stay tuned!

A brief write-up in Science Daily of some research and an article published this summer with some collaborators at  Ruhr University in Bochum Germany. We showed that older adults learned perceptual classifications about as well as younger adults, until they reached the point that they had to learn some exceptions. The older adults tended to stick with the rules, even if it meant making more errors. But other work (under review now) is looking at ways to mitigate or eliminate some of the mild cognitive impairments associated wth normal aging…

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160914090317.htm

If you are heading to Amsterdam on March 12-14, for the the inaugural International Convention of Psychological Science stop by Poster Session XI – Board: XI- 052 on Saturday to see Emily Nielsen present a poster on self-regulatory exertion and category learning. Emily’s poster is based on work done with Rahel Rabi and I last year, and that was recently published in Frontiers in Psychology.

The ICPS is a joint venture with the APS and the Initiative for Integrative Psychological Science designed to bring together psychological researchers and to discuss cutting edge research and current issues in Psychology. Of course, you’ll want to see Emily’s poster but the convention will also feature keynote talks by Stanislas Dehaene, George Lakoff and Terrie E. Moffitt.

New research published in Frontiers in Psychology by lab members Rahel Rabi and Dr. Minda explored the relationship between self regulatory behaviours and category learning. The study examined whether temporarily reducing participants’ executive functioning via a resource depletion manipulation would differentially impact RD and NRD category learning. Participants were either asked to write a story with no restrictions (the control condition), or without using two common letters (the ego depletion condition). Participants were then asked to learn either a set of RD categories or a set of NRD categories. Resource depleted participants performed more poorly than controls on the RD task, but did not differ from controls on the NRD task, suggesting that self regulatory resources are required for successful RD category learning. We argued that these results lend support to multiple systems theories (Like CoVIS) and also clarify the role of self-regulatory resources within this theory.

A new paper by Categorization Lab members Rachel Rabi, Sarah Miles, and Paul Minda that was just published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology explored category learning by young children and adults. You can read the paper here.  We conducted two experiments. The participants in our experiments were were asked to learn a set of categories for which both a single-feature rule and/or overall similarity would allow for perfect performance. Other rules allowed for suboptimal performance. After the participants learned the categories, we presented them with transfer stimuli (Experiments 1 and 2) and single features (Experiment 2) to help determine how the categories were learned. In both experiments, we found that adults made significantly more optimal rule-based responses to the test stimuli than children. Children showed a variety of categorization styles, with a few relying on the optimal rules, many relying on suboptimal single-feature rules, and only a few relying on overall family resemblance. We interpreted these results within a multiple-systems framework (like CoVIS). Children may show the patterns that they do because they lack the necessary cognitive resources to fully engage in hypothesis testing, rule selection, and verbally mediated category learning.

A new paper from our research group to appear in Academic Medicine , a collaborative project with Dr. Goldszmidt (the principle author) and Dr. Bordage, really tried to gather insight into what physicians should be thinking about during a clinical encounter. Specifically, we were interested in the conceptual frameworks used to identify and study these clinical reasoning tasks. The end result is an well-vetted list. We hope this list will drive and influence new research. Read the pre-press version here.

I will be presenting a talk called ” Did Your Subjects Eat Breakfast? Individual and Uncontrolled Variables Can Affect Performance.” A copy of the slides are available here.  If would like a copy of the questionare that we used, please click here. If you use this questionnaire in your research please cite my Psychonomics talk…a full publication will be available soon.

Ruby Nadler (3rd year Ph.D.), Rachel Rabi (1st year MSc) and Dr. Minda recently published a paper on how positive affect seems to enhance cognitive flexibility and enhance the learning of rule-defined categories. You can read the paper here.