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They are related and intertwined, but not the same thing.Cognitive abilities are the brain-based skills and mental processes needed to carry out any task and have more to do with the mechanisms of how you learn, remember, and pay attention rather than any actual knowledge you have learned.The term IQ, or Intelligence Quotient, generally describes a score on a test that rates your cognitive ability as compared to the general population.... There is a high positive correlation between IQ and success in school and the work place, but there are many, many cases where IQ and success do not coincide.Because IQ tests attempt to measure your ability to understand ideas and not just the quantity of your knowledge, learning new information does not automatically increase your IQ.

Ten sessions of exercises to boost reasoning skills, memory and mental processing speed staved off mental decline in middle-aged and elderly people in the first definitive study to show that honing intellectual skills can bolster the mind in the same way that physical exercise protects and strengthens the body. The researchers also showed that the [...]

Click on this link for some highlights:• "Physical exercise boosts the brain's rate of neurogenesis throughout one's life, while mental exercise increases the rate at which those new brain cells survive and make functional connections into your existing neural networks. Both physical exercise and the challenge from mental exercise increase the secretion of nerve growth factor, which helps your neurons grow and stay healthy.

If you haven't found one yet, here are some great posts with a lot of ideas to help find your own healthy resolutions.The Carnival of Positive Thinking has some really great entries this time. One of the articles in particular has some great suggestions to help your brain health into the new year- taking time to reflect, find a healthy balance of stimulation and rest, appreciating life, and being inquisitive.The Carnival of SportsThe Happiness CarnivalSo, what are your resolutions for 2007?

Auditory Processing Speed: the time it takes to perceive relevant auditory stimuli, encode, and interpret it and then make an appropriate response.Central Processing Speed: the time it takes to encode, categorize, and understand the meaning of any sensory stimuli.Conceptual Reasoning: includes concept formation, abstraction, deductive logic, and/or inductive logic. Divided Attention: the capability to recognize and respond to multiple stimuli at the same time.Fine Motor Control: the ability to accurately control fine motor movements.Fine Motor Speed: the time it takes to perform a simple motor response.Focused (or Selective) Attention: the ability to screen out distracting stimuli.Response Inhibition: the ability to avoid automatically reacting to incorrect stimuli.Sustained Attention: the ability to maintain vigilance.Visuospatial Classification: the ability to discriminate between visual objects based on a concept or rule.Visuospatial Sequencing: the ability to discern the sequential order of visual objects based on a concept or rule.Visual Perception: the ability to perceive fixed visual objects.Visual Processing Speed: the time it takes to perceive visual stimuli.Visual Scanning: the ability to find a random visual cue.Visual Tracking: the ability to follow a continuous visual cue.Working Memory: the ability to hold task-relevant information while processing it.

Just came back from a holiday party where I met some avid golfers who thought the concept of managing emotions through breathing, visualization and technology sounded like a bit far out. First I tried to paraphrase the quote “Effective management of the emotions in your golf game will not only lower your scores, but is guaranteed [...]

There is so much good in the season, but the stress and anxiety associated with the high expectations that come with the season can really eat away at that holiday spirit.But fortunately, you don't have to suffer through this time of year. With practice, there are many techniques that help restore peace and goodwill to all.Here are some of my recommendations: My 10-minute spa shower technique for stress reduction was published in the The Seventh Healthy & Fit Family Carnival.

We are very excited to announce our new guide: <strong>Brain Fitness for Sharp Brains: Your <em>New</em> New Year Resolution,</strong>. Alvaro Fernandez and Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg wrote it with Caroline Latham in order to provide an introduction to the concept, science, and practice of brain fitness.

Guess what?! There is this amazing therapy that is free for everyone. All you need is two feet (and many very accomplished practitioners don’t even have that!). … It’s called exercise! All kidding aside, there is more and more evidence coming to light about how your brain health is intricately intertwined with the health of [...]

Today we issued the following press release, and are working hard to get everything ready by January (everything works now, but we want to polish it). Please view this website as research in action, a living hypothesis. We are doing this because we love to learn and help. Please help us learn-feel free to give [...]

Authorities say a student brought a rifle to school and shot himself to death Tuesday at Springfield Township High School in Montgomery County in Erdenheim, Pennsylvania. The student’s death is reported in a statement the school district has posted on its Web site. The district says no one else was injured. “We have received a report that [...]

After years of colicky debate over which method is best for getting babies to fall asleep by themselves, experts have a soothing new message: just about all the techniques work, so pick one you are comfortable with and stick with it.Despite their apparent differences, most of the behavioral approaches reviewed in the October issue of [...]

Cognitive Development

Critical Concepts in Psychology

Cognitive Development is a new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Psychology. Edited by Usha Goswami, Director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge, this four-volume collection brings together the essential scholarship covering cognitive development from infancy to early adolescence. The sheer scale of the growth in research output in cognitive development makes this collection especially timely, and meets the demand for a comprehensive reference work to give greater clarity and focus to this theoretically complex and controversial field.

The collection is organized into four themes spanning the main research and teaching areas in the subdiscipline. For each theme, the editor has selected material is included which covers research spanning infancy through to late childhood and early adolescence to give a general developmental picture of the state-of-the-art in each area.

Knowledge about the physical world of objects and events (‘naïve physics’) has been described as a ‘foundational’ domain for cognitive development and Volume 1 (‘Objects and Concepts: The Physical World’) contains the very best empirical and theoretical work showing how infants and children come to understand objects and the physical laws governing their interactions, and how they come to understand the kinds of ‘stuff’ in the world, developing object concepts and categories.

Volume 2 (‘Language Development and the Psychological World’) gathers the most significant scholarship on the development of language and the infant’s developing understanding of the psychological world of desires, beliefs and emotions.

At least four types of learning seem fundamental to cognitive development: statistical learning; learning by imitation; learning by analogy and causal learning. Volume 3 (‘Learning, Memory and Reasoning’) collects work on these types of learning, and also brings together key work from the burgeoning literature on the development of memory and reasoning.

The final volume in the collection (‘The Development of Literacy and Numeracy, and Aspects of Atypical Development (Dyslexia, Dyscalculia and Autism)’) collects the essential scholarship on the cognitive developments important for language and number. Also collected in Volume 4 is vital psychological work on some of the most puzzling forms of atypical cognitive development, including autism, dyslexia and dyscalculia.

The collected materials are supplemented by an introduction to each volume, newly written by the editor, together with a full index. It is destined to be welcomed by cognitive development scholars—and those working in allied subdisciplines—as an invaluable reference resource.

Published December 12 2006 by Psychology Press.

Automaticity and Control in Language Processing

The use of language is a fundamental component of much of our day-to-day life. Language often co-occurs with other activities with which it must be coordinated. This raises the question of whether the cognitive processes involved in planning spoken utterances and in understanding them are autonomous or whether they are affected by, and perhaps affect, non-linguistic cognitive processes, with which they might share processing resources. This question is the central concern of Automaticity and Control in Language Processing.

The chapters address key issues concerning the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic processes, including:

• How can the degree of automaticity of a component be defined?
• Which linguistic processes are truly automatic, and which require processing capacity?
• Through which mechanisms can control processes affect linguistic performance? How might these mechanisms be represented in the brain?
• How do limitations in working memory and executive control capacity affect linguistic performance and language re-learning in persons with brain damage?

This important collection from leading international researchers will be of great interest to researchers and students in the area.

Published December 12 2006 by Psychology Press.

Automaticity and Control in Language Processing

• Edited by Antje Meyer, Linda Wheeldon, Andrea Krott

The use of language is a fundamental component of much of our day-to-day life. Language often co-occurs with other activities with which it must be coordinated. This raises the question of whether the cognitive processes involved in planning spoken utterances and in understanding them are autonomous or whether they are affected by, and perhaps affect, non-linguistic cognitive processes, with which they might share processing resources. This question is the central concern of Automaticity and Control in Language Processing.

The chapters address key issues concerning the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic processes, including:

• How can the degree of automaticity of a component be defined?
• Which linguistic processes are truly automatic, and which require processing capacity?
• Through which mechanisms can control processes affect linguistic performance? How might these mechanisms be represented in the brain?
• How do limitations in working memory and executive control capacity affect linguistic performance and language re-learning in persons with brain damage?

This important collection from leading international researchers will be of great interest to researchers and students in the area.

ISBN: 9781841696508

Published December 14 2006 by Psychology Press.

This is a wonderful, lengthy new article from New York Magazine: People who are suffering from burnout tend to describe the sensation in metaphors of emptiness—they’re a dry teapot over a high flame, a drained battery that can no longer hold its charge. Thirteen years, three books, and dozens of papers into his profession, Barry Farber, [...]

In 1982, a survey of clinical psychologists ranked Albert Ellis as the second most influential psychotherapist in history. Carl Rogers, who helped popularize the idea of the self-concept, was No. 1. Sigmund Freud was No. 3. To his admirers, Dr. Ellis, now 93, remains a giant with important things to say. For more than 30 years, Dr. Ellis, [...]

William M. Meredith, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, whose behind-the-scenes work in psychometrics revolutionized longitudinal studies analysis, died at his El Cerrito home on Monday, Dec. 4. He was 77.   During five decades of work in statistical analysis, Meredith was particularly active in the areas of aging and educational testing. [...]

Decades of medical research prove that mother’s milk has extraordinary health benefits for babies. But does breast-feeding also make babies smarter, as some advocates claim? The current scientific evidence points in both directions, making a definitive conclusion impossible. “Whether or not breast-feeding is truly associated with a child’s IQ is open to debate,” said Dr. Cathy Spong, [...]

In this post-Sept. 11 world of global terrorism and local school shootings, attitudes are changing about campus acts once winked at as teenage pranks. A 17-year-old Carlsbad High School boy was arrested in mid-November, a week after police alleged that he used a pay phone on campus to call in a bomb threat on Nov. 8 [...]