There's a simple trick to reduce your mind wandering while studying

It happens to all of us – we're meant to be focused on the page in the book, but our mind is turned inwards thinking about other stuff (Must remember to charge my phone, What time did I say I'd meet Sarah?) Thankfully a new study in Memory and Cognition identifies a straightforward way to reduce how much your mind wanders off topic when you're studying. You just need to ensure the materials you're learning are in your sweet spot – not too easy and not too difficult.

For one experiment, Judy Xu and Janet Metcalfe tested the ability of 26 students to translate 179 different English words into Spanish. For any that the students got wrong, they were asked to say whether they were close to learning the word or miles off. Based on this, the researchers created a tailor-made list of word pairs for each participant – some already mastered, some unknown but not far off being learned (psychologists call this the "region of proximal learning"), and finally some difficult word pairs that were far from being learned.

Next, the students spent time studying the easy, medium and difficult word pairs, and periodically they were given an onscreen prompt that asked them whether they were on-task or mind wandering (which they admitted to doing on about one third of the prompts). Finally, the students were tested on the word pairs they'd just studied. As the researchers predicted, the students mind wandered more while studying more difficult word pairs, compared with medium difficulty, and there was a trend for them to mind wander more during study of easy word pairs. Moreover, the final test showed that the students showed superior learning of word pairs for which they'd been on-task rather than mind wandering during the study phase.

A final experiment showed how these effects vary with a person's mastery of the material. Dozens more students were tested twice on easy, medium and difficult English-Spanish word pairs after two successive sessions of study. Poorer performers on the tests showed greater mind wandering when studying the more difficult pairs, while the stronger performers mind wandered more while studying the easier items.

The researchers said their findings suggest there is a "delicate balance" to be struck to find the right level of learning difficulty to reduce mind wandering (and so increase learning), and that the sweet spot depends on the difficulty of the materials and the expertise of the learner. You could try doing some basic self-testing alone or with a friend to try to find study material that's in your sweet spot. Concluding, the researchers said: "Our results suggest that students may sometimes mind wander not because of an inherent lack of motivation or an inability to learn, but rather because the difficulty of the to-be-learned materials is inappropriate."

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Xu, J., & Metcalfe, J. (2016). Studying in the region of proximal learning reduces mind wandering Memory & Cognition, 44 (5), 681-695 DOI: 10.3758/s13421-016-0589-8

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Practising self-control with a squeezy handgrip boosted these students' grades

It doesn't matter how brainy you are, if you don't make any effort, you're not going to do well at university (let's put aside the annoying few who seem to defy this rule by gliding through their studies). Indeed, psychologists are paying increasing intention to the role of self-control and self-discipline to academic success.

It's in this context that a team of Swiss researchers has tested the effects of two weeks of twice-daily hand squeezing using a commercially available handgrip. The idea is that squeezing the grip for as long as possible gives students practice at self-control – it takes willpower to resist giving up as soon as squeezing becomes uncomfortable – and the experience teaches the idea that exerting effort isn't aversive.

The research published in Motivation Science showed that dozens of students who performed the two weeks of hand squeezing in their first semester achieved "considerably" higher grades seven months' later at the end of the academic year, as compared with a control group of dozens of other students who didn't do the squeezing.

The benefit of the training seemed to come from the fact that the hand-squeeze students changed their attitudes to studying – in the weeks before their exams they showed an increased willingness to put effort into their studies and they actually studied more. In contrast, simple lab tests showed their inhibitory control and resistance to fatigue were unaffected, leading the researchers to propose the training benefits occurred through "broader motivational self-regulatory mechanisms". It's unlikely that the benefits of the hand-squeezing were simply a placebo effect – there was no difference in the effects of the intervention whether the students were explicitly told that the idea was to boost their self-control or not.

"This result seems extraordinary" the researchers said. "Possibly, this repeated exertion of self-control [the hand-squeezing training] reshaped participants' perception of effortful tasks as aversive, making them more willing to exert effort." The finding adds to previous studies that have shown the benefits of self-control training in other contexts such as stopping smoking, and the power of other simple psychological interventions, such as self-affirmation exercises, to benefit students' academic performance.

--Effects of practicing self-control on academic performance.

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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Why do women do so much better at university than their school test scores predict?

Picture an American high school staff-room, late in the academic year, where a teacher called Alice is listening to her colleagues ride their favourite hobby horse: picking out which students have the most promise.

Eventually Alice leans forward and taps her laptop. “Less talk, guys, more data. If you want to know how a student will do when they get to college, look at their aptitude test scores.” Betty throws her a look. “That won’t work,” she says, ”girls go on to do better than their test scores predict. Those tests are faulty.” Charles, the faculty provocateur, snorts. “Faulty? Not at all. Girls are only getting better grades because they pick softer subjects with easier marking.”

As her older colleagues tear into each other, Alice reflects on a third possibility: that succeeding at university depends on much more than the cognitive abilities measured by the SATs and ACTs (standard tests taken at American high schools), and that women might be better prepared in these other departments. But to resolve this staff-room squabble, who can tell these explanations apart?

Psychologists from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, that’s who. In a new paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Heidi Keiser’s team examine Alice and Charles’ rival explanations for why high school aptitude tests under-predict girls’ later success at university.

The new research first compared the university grades of 2000 students from a single institution with their high school aptitude scores. Women scored better on their course than you would expect based on an earlier aptitude test, but once the researchers took account of the female students’ higher average trait conscientiousness, 20 per cent of their grade surplus disappeared – a finding that replicates earlier research.

The researchers then decomposed the students’ degree course into elements, reasoning that if conscientiousness has a role in the gender gap, this should be greatest when grades depended highly on discretionary effort, like participating in discussion or research, and least when grades depended on raw smarts. The data showed that high school aptitude scores underestimated female performance on these effort-sensitive course elements, but were no worse at estimating their success on quizzes and tests than they were for men. Overall, this supports Alice’s perspective – that women do better than expected at university because of their greater effort and conscientiousness.

In a second study, the researchers tested Charles’ counter argument that women perform surprisingly well because they pick easier courses. The data, from huge historical datasets comprising nearly 400,000 students, showed that the courses men tended to take were significantly meaner (that is, male and female students on these courses tended to achieve worse grades than expected given their academic history) and were also more likely to be populated with high-achieving students competing for grades. And these factors, primarily course meanness, did explain a little of the overall tendency for female over-performance… but not more than nine per cent, much less than the effect of conscientiousness. A weak score, then, to Charles.

What about our other teacher Betty? Right from the start, she said the aptitude tests, measuring cognitive ability, simply weren’t doing it right. She could still have a case: the hidden variables found in this study – conscientiousness and course selection – together accounted for less than thirty per cent of the gender gap – possibly much less, if the two effects are not independent from each other.

However, it’s also plausible that aptitude tests are doing a reasonable job, it’s just that there are many non-cognitive factors critical to university success, and that conscientiousness is just one slice of this pie (an exploratory look at other personality variables by Keiser’s team suggests as much). If so, it’s not that school tests and exams need to be improved, but that they give us just one part of what higher education requires. We must not lose sight of the wider attributes, found particularly in female students, that travel from classrooms and school projects into our seminar rooms and lecture halls, and beyond.

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Keiser, H., Sackett, P., Kuncel, N., & Brothen, T. (2016). Why women perform better in college than admission scores would predict: Exploring the roles of conscientiousness and course-taking patterns. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101 (4), 569-581 DOI: 10.1037/apl0000069

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Teaching children the ancient "mental abacus" technique boosted their maths abilities more than normal extra tuition

Seeing an expert abacus user in action is a sight to behold. Their hands are a blur as they perform arithmetic operations far quicker than anyone using an electronic calculator. The mental abacus technique is even more impressive – it works just the same as a real abacus, except that you visualise moving the beads in your mind's eye (check out this video of people using mental abacus to perform amazing feats of arithmetic).

Surprisingly, there is little research on the benefits of teaching the mental abacus technique to children. But now, for a paper in Child Development, psychologists in the US have conducted a three-year randomised controlled trial of the effects of teaching the mental abacus on 183 five-to-seven year-old children at a charitable school in Vadodara, India. Their results suggest that training in the mental abacus can have impressive benefits for students'  mathematical abilities, above and beyond those seen for standard supplementary teaching, but that these benefits may not extend to children with weaker cognitive abilities.

The children took baseline tests of their maths and cognitive abilities, then they were allocated randomly to a group to receive three hours per week extra tuition in the abacus (the first year focused mostly on the physical abacus – specifically the Japanese soroban style – and then later years graduated to the mental abacus) or to a group that received three hours per week supplementary maths tuition, following the OUP New Enjoying Maths series.

When the children's maths and cognitive abilities were tested again at the end of the three-year study, those in the mental abacus group showed superior improvements in their maths abilities, including calculation, arithmetic and the conceptual understanding of place value, compared with the control group (effect sizes were large), and some modest advantages in their academic grades in maths and science. The mental abacus did not lead to wider benefits in cognitive abilities and it didn't change the children's attitudes to maths or reduce their maths anxiety – this latter result sounds disappointing, but also means the main benefit to maths ability is unlikely to be a placebo effect. Unfortunately, the exceptional benefits of mental abacus training to maths ability were not found among a subset of children who started out the study with weak spatial and working memory abilities.

"We find evidence that mental abacus – a system rooted in a centuries-old technology for arithmetic and counting – is likely to afford some children a measurable advantage in arithmetic calculation compared to additional hours of standard math training," the researchers said. "Our evidence suggests that mental abacus provides this benefit by building on children's pre-existing cognitive capacities rather than by modifying their ability to visualise and manipulate objects in working memory."

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Barner, D., Alvarez, G., Sullivan, J., Brooks, N., Srinivasan, M., & Frank, M. (2016). Learning Mathematics in a Visuospatial Format: A Randomized, Controlled Trial of Mental Abacus Instruction Child Development DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12515

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Compared with earlier generations, uni students today are more motivated by money and less by learning – US study

Between 1971 and 2014, the American Freshman Project has asked first-year students, most of them aged 18, about their reasons for going to university. Now for a paper in The Journal of Social Psychology, the psychologists Jean Twenge and Kristin Donnelly have analysed the answers of 8 million students across this period.

Among the reasons tested in the survey were: “To be able to get a better job”; “To be able to make more money”; “To learn more about things that interest me”; and “To prepare myself for graduate or professional school.”

To tie the students' answers to these questions to a validated psychological measure of motives, Twenge and Donnely asked 189 undergrads at San Diego State University to answer the same questions used in the Freshman Project and also had them complete an established research questionnaire about their aspirational motives – the Aspiration Index. This was to find out which answers on the Freshman survey tended to correlate with intrinsic (e.g. self-acceptance) and extrinsic (e.g. money-based) motives on the validated psychology questionnaire.

The researchers divided up the 8 million students who took the Freshman Project survey into three generations: Boomers (born 1944–1960), Generation X (1961–1979) and Millenials (1980–1994). The biggest change between Boomers and Millenials was that Millenials were more likely to say that they were attending university to make more money – an answer that, not surprisingly, correlates with extrinsic motives on the Aspiration Index. Another big change was that Millenials agreed less strongly that they were motivated to "learn about things that interest me" – an answer that reverse correlates with extrinsic motives.

The researchers said their findings provide support for anecdotal observations that today's students have a more "consumer mentality" than prior generations. Note, however, that the trends towards more interest in extrinsic motives began among Generation X in the 1990s; Millenials have simply continued that trajectory. Note too, that students continue to be more motivated overall by intrinsic factors than extrinsic ones, it's just that today they are more motivated by money and less by learning than in the past.

The study can't speak to why students' motives have changed, though the researchers note that income inequality and rising attendance at university have increased alongside stronger extrinsic motives. They also warn that students' increased tendency to see education as "a transactional procedure or a means to an end" could be harmful, undermining their ability to retain what they learn and increasing the temptation to cheat and plagiarise.

--Generational differences in American students’ reasons for going to college, 1971–2014: The rise of extrinsic motives
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Why are boys better than girls at maths in some countries but not others?

There are many reasons for the paucity of women in science and technology careers, but arguably one early contributing factor is the relatively weaker performance of girls in maths at school, compared with boys. Is this because girls are inherently poorer than boys at maths? To help find out, a new study in Journal of Experimental Child Psychology has compared gender differences in maths ability among 250 school children, aged six to seven, in three countries: USA, Russia and Taiwan.

On more complex addition problems involving double-digit operations (25 + 37), boys outperformed girls in the USA and Russia, but not in Taiwan. The researchers also asked the children how they arrived at their solutions. In the USA and Russia, girls preferred to use less effective counting strategies (for example, counting on their fingers) whereas boys used more "decomposition" – transforming original problems into two or more simpler problems. In Taiwan, by contrast, girls used decomposition for complex problems just as much as boys.

Taken together, the findings are consistent with the idea that girls may have a predisposition to use less effective arithmetic strategies compared to boys, but that this can be addressed through the right tuition.

The gender difference in strategy use, shown here and in earlier research, may be due to early social experiences, or it could be related to an innate gender difference in visualisation and spatial abilities that are useful for decomposition strategies.

Regardless, the fact that in Taiwan girls were adept as boys at complex addition problems, and that girls in this country used decomposition strategy as often boys strongly suggests that gender differences in maths skill and strategy use are not fixed. Consistent with this, it happens that the Taiwan education system places more emphasis than the US and Russia on teaching effective strategy use.

The researchers acknowledged their findings are observational, and that there is speculation in this interpretation of the results. We need experiments now to test the effects of early instruction in strategy use. "Interventions that start at the elementary school level may have a cumulative effect by increasing girls’ confidence and their participation in more challenging math classes later in school," the researchers said.

--Here, but not there: Cross-national variability of gender effects in arithmetic
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Want to remember something? Draw it

If you've got some revision to do, get yourself a sketch pad and start drawing out the words or concepts that you want to remember. That's the clear message from a series of studies in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology that demonstrates drawing is a powerful memory aid.

Jeffrey Wammes and his colleagues first presented dozens of students with 30 easily drawable words such as "apple". For each word, they had to spend 40 seconds writing it out repeatedly, or drawing it. The students then completed a filler task for a couple of minutes, which involved classifying the pitch of different tones. Then they were given a surprise memory test and asked to recall as many of the earlier words as possible. Participants recalled more than double the proportion of drawn words than written words. The drawing advantage held in a variation of the experiment in which the 40 seconds were spent either drawing each word repeatedly, or writing out each word just once and then spending additional time adding visual detail, such as shading.

In further experiments with dozens more students, the researchers showed that drawing was a better memory aid than visualising the words, than writing a description of the physical characteristics of each word's meaning (designed to encourage deep-level encoding of the words), and more effective than looking at pictures of the words. The drawing advantage also remained when participants were given just four seconds to draw each word, and whether they performed the tasks alone or together in a lecture hall.

The researchers think that drawing has this effect because it involves lots of different mental processes that are known to benefit memory, such as visualization and deep-level elaboration. "We propose that drawing, through the seamless integration of its constituent parts, produces a synergistic effect, whereby the whole benefit is greater than the sum of the benefit of each component," they said. They acknowledged more research is needed to show the usefulness of these findings to real life: "While we did show that the drawing effect is reliable in group testing in our experiments, the content was still only single words and hardly representative of an academic setting."

--The drawing effect: Evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall

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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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More time in day nursery before age two is associated with higher cognitive scores at age four

Many working parents experience guilt about sending their young children off to day nursery, especially in light of research published in the 2000s that suggested that too much early childcare is associated with later behavioural problems. However, a new study in the International Journal of Behavioural Development paints a more positive picture – the more time children spent in day nursery before the age of two (defined as group-based childcare outside the home), the better their cognitive performance when they were tested at 51 months. Based on their findings, the researchers – Jacqueline Barnes and Edward Melhuish at Birkbeck, University of London – suggest that the UK Government should consider rolling out free childcare provision at an earlier age (in the UK at present, limited free childcare doesn't begin until age three).

The findings come from 978 children and their families who were recruited between 1998 and 2001; 217 of the children received varying amounts of group-based nursery care before the age of two. The children's cognitive abilities were assessed at 18 months and 51 months.

The types and amounts of early non-parental childcare that the children received in the home (for example, time being looked after by grandparents or a childminder) were mostly unrelated to their later cognitive abilities. But group-based childcare outside of the home before the age of two was linked with superior cognitive abilities at age 51 months, especially non-verbal abilities, and the earlier in life it started, and the more of it per week, the better. This held true even after controlling for the children's cognitive abilities at 18 months, and after controlling for the influence of important demographic factors such as mothers' education. The quality of the group-based childcare didn't seem to impact this beneficial effect, although information on quality of care was only available for some of the children.

The sample included a disproportionate proportion of advantaged families, but in a sense the researchers said this adds to the interest of the results – it means the benefits of early group-based childcare are found even for children who have comfortable home environments.

It's worth highlighting that aspects of the home environment were also relevant to children's cognitive development. For example, the link between maternal responsiveness during a child's first year and the child's later cognitive abilities was stronger than the link between more early group-based childcare and later cognitive abilities. But the importance of the new finding comes from the fact that the early group-based childcare seemed to have "small but significant" beneficial effects even after taking maternal factors such as this into account. The researchers said these benefits of early nursery care "may be related to the fact that group contexts are likely to provide interactions with a wider range of people, both adults and children, and also a greater choice of activities if good quality is maintained."

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Barnes, J., & Melhuish, E. (2016). Amount and timing of group-based childcare from birth and cognitive development at 51 months: A UK study International Journal of Behavioral Development DOI: 10.1177/0165025416635756

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Most of us are overconfident about how much we understand things – this simple intervention can help

Most of us massively overestimate our understanding of everyday objects, like the vacuum cleaner

"True wisdom is knowing what you don't know" Socrates.

When we're asked how much we understand the workings of everyday things like vacuum cleaners or computer printers, most of us massively overestimate our own knowledge. This overconfidence extends beyond objects to more abstract matters, such as our comprehension of political policies, and collectively the phenomenon is known as "the illusion of explanatory depth".

One already established antidote is to ask people produce a detailed explanation of whatever it is that they think they understand – after doing this, most of us come to realise the true modesty of our knowledge. However, as an intervention or "cure" for reducing over-confidence, producing full explanations is impractical because it is time consuming and unappealing. But now a team of psychologists at Washington and Lee University has demonstrated that it's not necessary to have people generate full explanations – merely asking them to reflect briefly, in a very specific way, on their knowledge is enough to effectively combat overconfidence.

Across nine studies involving hundreds of people recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk website, the researchers tested the effectiveness of what they call "Reflecting on Explanatory Ability". Before estimating their understanding of various objects, including vacuum cleaners, crossbows, treadmills and umbrellas, participants were instructed to:

"Carefully reflect on your ability to explain to an expert, in a step-by-step, causally-connected manner, with no gaps in your story how the object works".

Spending a few seconds doing this was enough to substantially reduce people's estimates of their own knowledge, almost as much as spending time typing out a full explanation, and far more than simply spending time on unguided reflection (in the unguided condition, the instruction was to "carefully reflect on your understanding of how the object works").

The researchers believe that "Reflecting on Explanatory Ability" works because it forces people to assess the complexity of the object they're thinking about and to get a sense of the number of gaps in their knowledge. Supporting this interpretation, the researchers found that the guided reflection instructions were not as effective when they lacked the specific wording "in a step-by-step, causally connected manner". Similarly, adding the additional, later instruction to "estimate how many steps it would take to explain how the parts enable the object to work" did not enhance the "Reflection on Explanatory Ability" intervention, suggesting that this is what the intervention already prompts participants to do.

Also consistent with the idea that the "Reflection on Explanatory Ability" intervention works by provoking participants to perform a quick complexity assessment, the researchers found that their intervention was less effective at correcting people's confidence in their knowledge of less complex objects (the researchers acknowledged this means there is still a useful role for generating full explanations in these cases).

In another test, the researchers checked and confirmed that the benefits of their "Reflection on Explanatory Ability" intervention were not due to participants producing silent explanations in their heads – that is, the intervention was just as effective whether participants reflected for five or twenty seconds (if they were engaging in covert explanation, then the intervention should have been more effective after twenty seconds).

In the final study, the researchers showed that their intervention doesn't just help combat people's overconfidence in their understanding of objects, it can also reduce their overconfidence in their understanding of political policies (such as the idea of merit-based pay for teachers), and as a consequence, it makes their attitudes towards those policies more moderate.

Johnson and his team concluded that "Reflection on Explanatory Ability; REA" is a "rare metacognitive tool in the arsenal to combat our proclivity to overestimate understanding" and that "perhaps REA can help us gain the wisdom to which Socrates was referring."
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  Johnson, D., Murphy, M., & Messer, R. (2016). Reflecting on Explanatory Ability: A Mechanism for Detecting Gaps in Causal Knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/xge0000161

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Fantasy-based pretend play is beneficial to children's mental abilities

To prepare our children to meet the goals of a complex world, we should pull them out of their managed world and plop them in the mermaid’s court. That’s the verdict of a randomised control trial published recently in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology that found American pre-schoolers who engaged in fantastical pretend play showed improvements to their executive function – the suite of cognitive abilities that organises thought and actions to achieve goals.

The study involved daily 15-minute play sessions across five weeks, in which a research assistant led 39 children aged three to five through a fantastical script, such as going to the moon. After the five week period, the pretend play kids showed greater gains in their ability to memorise lists of digits (a classic test of working memory, itself a core component of executive function) as compared with 32 age-matched children in a standard play condition, who spent their sessions singing songs and passing a ball around a circle.

The pretend play group also showed a bigger improvement on an executive function attention-shift task, which involved switching from sorting blocks by colour to shape. This result squeaked through thanks to the standard-play group’s scores actually creeping down over time as the pretend group scores crept up, but note that on its own terms, the pre-to-post change in pretend group performance wasn’t itself statistically significant. On a third executive function measure – “inhibition of responses” (children had to follow a tricky instruction to label a nighttime scene as day, and a daytime scene as night) – there was no effect of the pretend play.

What might be driving the improvements to executive function that were found? Pretend play involves the adoption of certain mental scripts, such as “I’m a dragon and should flap my arms when I’m moving,” that don’t carry across to the real world, which means players have to selectively adopt and switch between these scripts and default norms of behaviour. Drawing on past evidence, lead author Rachel Thibodeau and her colleagues said they suspected that it’s the fantastical elements of pretend play that are the most liable to hothouse executive function development, as they involve managing specific, unique scripts and larger leaps from the everyday than, say, answering a toy telephone.

The researchers’ interpretation was supported in a followup analysis that coded the style of play each child displayed over the 25 sessions: children whose pretending was more fantastical did better at the working memory task. Also, greater overall engagement in the pretend play activity was associated with two outcomes: larger improvements in executive function, as well as firmer beliefs in fantastical entities like the tooth fairy.

I mentioned this was a controlled study, but have so far avoided talking about the third control group, which comprised children who didn’t enjoy any kind of play but simply continued their lessons. My reason is that comparisons between the pretend play group and no-play control group tended to be statistically non-significant. The control group’s executive function scores were in between the play groups – meaning that they actually did better than the standard play condition.

Future research might show that pretend play is better than no play at all, but the best-supported conclusion from the current study is different: that play that gives children scope to exercise their imagination is more valuable than rote, managed play experiences, such as another rousing chorus of “the wheels on the bus.” After all, during class-time at least you can grab a minute to daydream about dragons. I know I did.

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Thibodeau, R., Gilpin, A., Brown, M., & Meyer, B. (2016). The effects of fantastical pretend-play on the development of executive functions: An intervention study Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 145, 120-138 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2016.01.001

--further reading--
How young boys build imaginary worlds together
Fantasy-prone children struggle to apply lessons from fantasy stories

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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How do British children feel when they hear the National Anthem?

Some pieces of music you can’t escape knowing, and for children in 1960s Britain, God Save the Queen would qualify, according to research published back then. But a new study in the Psychology of Music suggests times have changed: only six in ten children at a Dorset primary school were able to correctly name the piece. Yet, the British National Anthem still appears capable of rousing positive, nationalistic associations within the young. When The University of Surrey researchers Naomi Winstone and Kirsty Witherspoon asked 62 Sussex schoolchildren, aged eight to ten, to listen to the British National Anthem, and two pieces with similar musical properties, the children said they felt more positive emotions listening to the anthem compared with the other pieces, and nearly half described a specifically national basis for their reaction, such as feeling honoured or loyal to the country.

Winstone and Witherspoon noted that various sectors of society – politicians, teachers and in some cases students themselves – have called for schools to take a role in guiding a more “balanced perspective on British patriotism.” This study shows how symbolic content can elicit nationality-linked emotions in young children, emotions that will inevitably play some role in the more explicit national identity that is known to develop from around age 11. The researchers said that  “gaining a deeper understanding of how children respond to nationally salient music might provide insight into how music education can best foster positive identity with an increasingly diverse Britain.”

--‘It’s all about our great Queen’: The British National Anthem and national identity in 8–10-year-old children

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Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Twin study raises doubts about the relevance of "grit" to children's school performance

Grit is in vogue. US psychologist Angela Duckworth's TED talk on grit is one of the most popular recorded. And her forthcoming book on the subject, subtitled "the power of passion and perseverance" is anticipated to be a bestseller. On both sides of the pond, our governments have made the training of grit in schools a priority.

To psychologists, "grit" describes how much perseverance someone shows towards their long-term goals, and how much consistent passion they have for them. It's seen as a "sub-trait" that's very strongly related to, and largely subsumed by, conscientiousness, which is known as one of the well-established "Big Five" main personality traits that make up who we are.

The reason for all the interest in grit, simply, is that there's some evidence that people who have more grit do better in life. Moreover, it's thought that grit is something you can develop, and probably more easily than you can increase your intelligence or other attributes.

But to a team of psychologists based in London and led by behavioural genetics expert Robert Plomin, the hype around grit is getting a little out of hand. There just isn't that much convincing evidence yet that it tells you much about a person beyond the Big Five personality traits, nor that it can be increased through training or education.

Supporting their view, the researchers have published an analysis in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology of the personalities, including grit, and exam performance at age 16 of thousands of pairs of twins. Some of the twins were identical meaning they share the same genes, while others were non-identical meaning they share roughly half their genes just like non-twin siblings do. By comparing similarities in personality and exam performance between these two types of twin, the researchers were able to disentangle the relative influence of genes and the environment on these measures.

The main finding is that the participants' overall personality scores were related to about 6 per cent of the variation seen in their exam performance. Grit specifically was related to just 0.5 per cent of the differences seen in exam performance. Given the small size of this relationship, the researchers said "we believe that these results should warrant concern with the educational policy directives in the United States and the United Kingdom."

Also relevant to the hype around grit, the researchers found that how much grit the participants had was to a large extent inherited (about a third of the difference in grit scores were explained by genetic influences), and that none of the difference in grit was explained by environmental factors that twin pairs shared, such as the way they were raised by their parents and the type of schooling they had (this leaves the remaining variance in grit either influenced by so-called "non-shared environmental factors" – those experiences in life that are unique to a person and not even shared by their twin who they live with – or unexplained). This is a disappointing result for grit enthusiasts because it suggests that the experiences in life that shape how much grit someone has are not found in the school or the home (at least not for the current sample). Bear in mind, though, that this doesn't discount the possibility that a new effective home- or school-based intervention could be developed.

The researchers concluded that once you know a child's main personality scores, knowing their amount of grit doesn't seem to tell you much more about how well they'll do at school. This study doesn't rule out the idea that increasing children's grit, if possible, could be beneficial, but the researchers warned that "more research is warranted into intervention and training programs before concluding that such training increases educational achievement and life outcomes."

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Rimfeld, K., Kovas, Y., Dale, P., & Plomin, R. (2016). True Grit and Genetics: Predicting Academic Achievement From Personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1037/pspp0000089

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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How to evaluate an argument like a scientist

From the pontifications of the politician on the nightly news, to the latest tabloid health scare, we're constantly bombarded by other people's arguments – their attempts to make a particular claim based on some kind of evidence. How best to evaluate all these assertions and counter-assertions? Some insights come from a new study in the journal Thinking and Reasoning that's compared the argument evaluation strategies of scientists (advanced doctoral students and post-docs in psychology) with those used by first-year undergrad psych students.

Sarah von der Mühlen and her colleagues presented the 20 undergrads and 20 psychologists with two passages of text, approximately 400 words long, about smoking and addiction, each containing a mix of plausible and implausible arguments (note the superficial meaning and grammar of the implausible arguments was not at fault).

There were several elements to the task: All the participants were asked to identify the different components of the arguments and to judge the plausibility of the arguments. They were specifically told to evaluate the arguments based on their internal consistency and quality, not based on their own prior knowledge or opinion. The participants were also interviewed afterwards about what they'd thought of the task, the strategies they'd used to evaluate the arguments, and whether the arguments contained any of a list of fallacies, such as being circular. For one of the texts, the participants were asked to speak their thoughts out loud as they evaluated the arguments, granting the researchers immediate insight into their evaluation strategies.

As you might expect, the psychologists were better than the students at judging the plausibility of the arguments (achieving roughly 80 per cent vs. 70 per cent accuracy). The psychologists were especially superior at spotting weak or implausible arguments (they spotted nearly 80 per cent of these vs. 60 per cent spotted by the students). The psychologists, who took more time to judge plausibility, were also better at breaking down the structure of the arguments, especially at recognising what's known as the argument "warrant" – this is the link made between the claim and the evidence cited to support that claim.

From analysing the participants' out-loud thoughts and their comments at interview, the researchers established that at least part of the reason the psychologists were better at evaluating the arguments was that they far more often than the students (over 40 per cent of the time vs. around 12 per cent of the time) actually followed the instructions and made their judgments by considering the internal consistency of the arguments and whether the arguments contained any logical fallacies, including: being circular in nature; containing a contradiction; using a wrong example; citing a false dichotomy; or overgeneralising (see box for examples). By contrast, the students more often (approximately 43 vs. 27 per cent of the time) relied on their intuition (as revealed by comments like "I don't know why, but that just doesn't sound plausible to me") and on their prior opinions or knowledge.

Psychologists and other scientists aren't usually given formal training in argument logic and analysis, but the researchers think they probably pick up a lot of relevant analytical skills through their training and the social aspects of being a scientist. Further analysis suggested that a greater awareness of the formal structure of arguments (check out the Toulmin model of argumentation for more on this), and the range of argument fallacies, helped the psychologists better evaluate the arguments used in this study. However, we need to be aware that the study was cross-sectional so we don't know that this knowledge caused their better performance – for example, perhaps being the kind of person to take on post-doctoral science studies makes you better at judging arguments and/or maybe the psychologists were more motivated to excel at the task and follow the instructions.

Another limitation of this research is that the students and psychologists were assessing arguments in a context that was at least partly related to their domain of expertise or study (but note that no prior knowledge was required to judge the plausibility of the arguments). It would be interesting to know how well the psychologists argument evaluation skills would extend to other topics. For now though, what this research reveals is that when it comes to evaluating arguments, people find it very difficult to put aside their gut instincts, their prior opinions and knowledge and to judge the arguments in a logical way, based on their actual quality and coherence. Although we think of scientists as highly knowledgeable experts, their greater skill at evaluating arguments actually seems to come from their ability to forget what they know and to judge an argument on its merits.
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  von der Mühlen, S., Richter, T., Schmid, S., Schmidt, E., & Berthold, K. (2015). Judging the plausibility of arguments in scientific texts: a student–scientist comparison Thinking & Reasoning, 1-29 DOI: 10.1080/13546783.2015.1127289

--Further reading and listening--
PsychCrunch Episode 3: How To Win An Argument
When our beliefs are threatened by facts, we turn to unfalsifiable justifications
Conspiracy theorists are more focused on discrediting official accounts than proposing their own
Five minutes with the discoverer of the Scientific Impotence Excuse, Geoffrey Munro

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Students who believe they have more "free will" do better academically

Psychologists are coming to realise that it's not just people's abilities that are important in life but their beliefs about their abilities. Much of this research has focused on whether people think traits like intelligence and self-control are fixed or malleable, with those individuals who endorse the idea of malleability tending to fare better at mental tasks and even at life in general, at least as measured by their feelings of well-being.

Now a study in Personality and Individual Differences has added to this picture by showing that students who believe they have "free will" in the philosophical sense (they agree with statements like "I have free will" and "I am in charge of my actions even when my life's circumstances are difficult") tend to do better academically. The result suggests that it's not just people's beliefs about the nature of ability that influences their scholarly performance, but also their more fundamental beliefs about the limits of human choice and volition.

As an initial test of their ideas, Gilad Feldman and his colleagues began by asking 116 undergrads (a mix of Hong Kong Chinese, Chinese and international students) to rate how much free will they have on a sliding scale from 0 to 100 and then to complete a proof-reading challenge. The students who said they had more free will did better at spotting mistakes in the text, finding more of them in less time.

Next, the researchers asked 614 more students (again a mix of Hong Kong, Chinese and international) to answer questions at the start of their university semester about their free will beliefs, their self-control, and whether people's traits are fixed or malleable. At the end of the semester, the students who'd previously reported stronger beliefs in their free will tended to have scored a higher grade in their studies, and they received better performance appraisals from their tutors.

This free will/performance association was stronger than the links between trait self-control and academic performance, and between belief in people's malleability and academic performance. Moreover, the association between belief in free will and academic performance held even when accounting statistically for the influence of these other factors (it also held across age, gender and cultural grouping). However, belief in free will and trait self-control did interact – the very highest academic performers were those students who endorsed the idea of free will and who said they had a lot of self-control.

These findings add to past research that's shown the consequences of belief in free will, such as that people who believe more strongly in their own free will are better able to learn from their mistakes. Feldman and his team said "Increasing evidence suggests that the belief in free will is more than an implicit, abstract, or philosophical belief and that it holds important implications for both cognition and behaviour." There is intuitive sense in this idea – one can imagine that a student who believes more strongly in their own free will will take proactive steps to deal with academic challenges, rather than submitting passively to failure.

Findings like these, if they can be replicated and established as robust, are exciting because in theory it should be easier to influence people's belief in free will (and other ability related beliefs) in ways that contribute to better academic performance, as compared with trying to shift their IQ, say, or boost their self-discipline. Taking a more sceptical approach, bear in mind that this was a cross-sectional study, so the causal effect of free will beliefs has not been established. It's possible that more intelligent, capable and otherwise advantaged students are simply more likely to believe in their own free will.

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Feldman, G., Chandrashekar, S., & Wong, K. (2016). The freedom to excel: Belief in free will predicts better academic performance Personality and Individual Differences, 90, 377-383 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2015.11.043

--further reading--
Seven-year-olds' beliefs about ability are associated with the way they were praised as toddlers
Be careful when comforting struggling students
Life is better for people who believe willpower is unlimited
Debunking people's belief in free will takes the intention out of their movements
People's belief in free will is lower when they need to urinate or desire sex

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Feeling like you're an expert can make you closed-minded

"Not listening ..."

What happens to us as we accrue knowledge and experience, as we become experts in a field? Competence follows. Effortlessness follows (pdf). But certain downsides can follow too. We reported recently on how experts are vulnerable to an overclaiming error – falsely feeling familiar with things that seem true of a domain but aren’t. Now a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology explores how feelings of expertise can lead us to be more dogmatic towards new ideas.

Victor Ottati at Loyola University and his colleagues manipulated their participants (US residents, average age in their 30s) to feel relative experts or novices in a chosen field, through easy questions like “Who is the current President of the United States?” or tough ones like “Who was Nixon's initial Vice-President?” and through providing feedback to enforce the participants’ feelings of knowledge or ignorance. Those participants manipulated to feel more expert subsequently acted less open-minded toward the same topic, as judged by their responses to items such as “I am open to considering other political viewpoints.” 

People’s perceptions of their all-round expertise – provoked in the participants via an easy rather than a hard trivia quiz – also led them to display a close-mindedness in general, even though it was the participants who took the hard quiz who failed more, and reported feeling more insecure, irritable and negative – ingredients that are normally associated with close-mindedness. This isn’t to say that these emotional states didn’t have any effect, just that any effect was swamped by perceptions of expertise.

These findings are somewhat counterintuitive because there are good reasons to have expected the opposite results. Firstly, real-life experts take a long road that involves acquiring and synthesising new information, at times requiring them to flip their way of thinking about things – for instance, a chemist might recall how atoms operated one way in early grade science, only for later schooling to reveal a very different picture. As such, dogmatism is an obstacle to true expertise. Secondly, research on stress and emotion tells us that feeling relaxed and successful – as you might expect an expert to feel more than a novice – encourages open-mindedness. 

But Ottati and his colleagues point out that open-mindedness doesn’t exist in a vacuum - it ebbs and flows according to the social situation. It’s not as acceptable to pooh-pooh the content of a university lecture the same way you might do the street demagogue’s patter. The researchers argued too that as well as the situation, your own social role matters, and the "expert" is a social role that gives you permission to opt-out of open-mindedness.

How do we know the closed-mindedness associated with feeling expert was driven by assumptions the participants were making about the social role of expert, and not the effect of some other psychological state? For example, an alternative explanation could be that the participants made to feel expert were overwhelmed by a sense of power, something past research has shown to make contributions from others appear less relevant. We know it must be about social role because the effect was maintained when participants didn’t themselves feel special at all. In another experiment, the researchers asked their participants whether it was justified for someone to ignore the political opinions of other people at a party, when the individual in question was more expert than, more novice than, or similar to the other guests. The hypothetical was framed in two ways: “you are at a party where…” or “John is at a party where…” – in both cases, the participants considered an expert was justified in acting dogmatic. 

Taken altogether, how robust are these findings? On the main effect itself (linking feelings of expertise with close-mindedness), note that the sample sizes were quite small – there were only 30-60 participants per experiment. However the effect was uncovered using slightly different methods across six experiments, giving us faith that there’s something real here. However we need to be cautious in how we interpret these results. The study shows us the effect of the social role of expertise, manipulated independently from the true possession of expertise. In other words, the path of acquiring knowledge, and being wrong a lot along the way, may produce countervailing positive influences upon open-mindedness, something not examined in this study. This means we can conclude from this research a narrow but important point: that thinking of yourself as "being the expert" can be an obstacle to open-mindedness.

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Ottati, V., Price, E., Wilson, C., & Sumaktoyo, N. (2015). When self-perceptions of expertise increase closed-minded cognition: The earned dogmatism effect Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 61, 131-138 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2015.08.003

Note: In an earlier version of this post we stated incorrectly that the participants were students. This has now been corrected – in fact the participants were US residents in general and the mean age was somewhere in the 30s for each study.

--further reading--
Experts are especially prone to claiming they know more than they do

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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