"Without remembering how the past unfolded, trying to plan ahead is "like being in a room with nothing there and having a guy tell you to go find a chair."
Author: Carl Zimmer, Discover, April 24, 2012 (April issue of the printed magazine).

The researchers "decided to study “fake” exercise instead, using two specialized drugs that had been tested several years ago by scientists at the Salk Institute in San Diego. The drugs had been shown to induce the same kinds of changes in sedentary animals’ muscles that exercise would cause, so that even though the mice didn’t exercise, they physiologically responded as if they had. ... After a week of receiving either of the two drugs (and not exercising), the mice performed significantly better on tests of memory and learning than control animals that had simply remained quiet in their cages. ...The results, published in the journal Learning and Memory, showed that the drugged animals’ brains also contained far more new neurons in brain areas central to learning and memory than the brains of the control mice, an effect found by microscopic examination."
Author: Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, May 9, 2012

"Once we accounted for cognitive abilities like memory and processing speed, age had nothing to do with predicting whether an individual would make the best economic decisions on the tasks we assigned," [researcher Scott] Huettel said.
The study was published in the Psychology and Aging journal, published by the American Psychological Association."

"Decision scaffolding is the concept that you can give people structure for decision-making that helps them," Huettel said. "We should try to identify ways in which to present information to older adults that gives them scaffolding to make the best choices. If we can reduce the demand on memory or the need to process information very quickly that would be a great benefit to older adults and may push them toward making the same economically beneficial decisions as younger adults."
Author: Science Daily, June 1, 2010

Summary on Twitter by Dr. SunWolf @TheSocialBrain
{The Neuroscience of Working Memory} Even when our attention drifts, our brain's working memory is still working.
This is heavy academic article

"Many capable, hard-working students perform poorly on exams because they’ve overtaxed their 'working memory' — the mental scratchpad on which we combine information from our long-term memory with the specifics of the problem in front of us, in the service of finding a solution.

"It pays to be so narratively nimble, at least in evolutionary terms. Our world is full of stories we must detect to survive well. Think of the plots and gossip we must manage each hour of our social lives, let alone the millions of pieces of sensory input our brain must manage daily. To order this ambiguous abundance, our brains naturally tell stories. Without stories our experience of life would be incoherent, meaningless."
"But our storytelling minds are deeply flawed. They can even be dangerous, particularly in the legal domain where witnesses must recount vital facts in narrative testimony, where lawyers’ arguments commonly take shape in narrative form, and where jurors tell their own stories to decide cases. Like any good storyteller, our minds hate directionless plots, unmotivated characters, and pure coincidence. Our storytelling mind is addicted to the meaning of a soap opera. So addicted, in fact, that our storytelling mind will create meaningful patterns in the world even when no such patterns exist. We impose patterns on the world. In the words of science writer Jonathan Gottschall, “the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.” We should take note of how often it can’t."
Author: Literary Lawyers, April 14, 2012

A study "shows children who take music lessons have better verbal memory skills than others and may find it easier to learn in school.
Researchers say the findings suggest that experiences that activate and alter a region of the brain may improve performance in other tasks supported by that area, much in the same way cross training boosts athletic performance."
Author: Jennifer Warner, WebMD, July 28, 2003

Music eases anxiety in cancer patients, reduces stress, helps during brain surgery to lower the patient's stress, protects your ears' sound processing ability, boosts heart health,soothes pain, helps memory, protects the aging brain, prevents heart transplant rejection (in mice),improves stroke recovery, works as well as massage at lower anxiety.

"Odd as it may seem, University of Maryland Medical Center researchers have found a link between listening to music and heart health.
... listening to joyful music is linked with dilation of blood vessels' inner lining, meaning more flow of blood through the blood vessels."
"WebMD reported that taking music lessons is linked with doing better on tests where you have to recall words you read on a list.
And 'the more music training during childhood, the better the verbal memory,' study researcher Agnes S. Chan, PhD, a psychologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told WebMD."
Author: Amanda L. Chan, Huffington Post, April 11, 2011

"Children whose minds wander might have sharper brains, research suggests. ... Daniel Levinson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, said that those with higher working memory capacity reported 'more mind wandering during these simple tasks', but their performance did not suffer."
Author: The Telegraph, March 16, 2012

Keeping your brain young through cognitive activity.

Article about designing user experiences that reduce cognitive load and minimize cognitive barriers
Author: Jordan Julien, UX Magazine, March 6, 2012

Studies show that sleep enhances learning, memory, and problem solving"
Author: Sherrie Bourg Carter, Psychology Today, March 4, 2012

“Important cognitive skills, such as attentional control, may be closely related to the capacity to maintain rhythmic synchrony within a group, an ability that music trains in unique ways,”
Author: US News & World Report, Feb 24, 2012

I wrote a while back about the concept of deliberate practice, which is basically the idea that if you want to achieve mastery of something you need to (a) practice a lot, and (b) practice well. A study I came across recently, however, suggests that practice may not be the key to greatness ..."
"While there is little doubt that continuous deliberate practice does improve performance, it may still not be enough to enable the leap from good to great. Recent research suggests that the capacity of your working memory – the part of memory that actively process new information as we encounter it – may be a more important factor. Dr. Zach Hambrick, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, says that 'While the specialized knowledge that accumulates through practice is the most important ingredient to reach a very high level of skill, it’s not always sufficient.'  Intellectual ability matters, and “the jury’s still out” on exactly how much control we have when it comes to enhancing our natural intellectual abilities"
Author: Jeff Cobb, Mission to Learn, undated (appears to be posted Nov 18, 2011 based on the comments)

Test of working memory

"Knowledge is the essence of smart thinking. No matter how much raw intelligence you have, you are not going to succeed at solving complex problems without knowing a lot. ..."
"Robert Bjork and fellow PT blogger Nate Kornell have explored some of the study habits of college students in a 2007 paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Research on memory provides a number of important suggestions about the most effective ways to study. One of the most important tips is that students should study by testing themselves rather than just reading over the material. It is also important to study over a period of days rather waiting until the last minute to study. Kornell and Bjork's studies suggest that only about 2/3 of college students routinely quiz themselves, and a majority of students study only one time for upcoming exams."
Author: Ulterior Motives, Psychology Today, Feb 27, 2012

Research showed that people remembered 90% of 2500 visual images 3 days after viewing each image once for only 2 second. This is the abstract.
Standing, Lionel;Conezio, Jerry;Haber, Ralph N.
Psychonomic Science, Vol 19(2), 1970, 73-74.
Author: APA PsycNet

Response to the Wired article with the same title. "While I’ve always known that forgetting plays an important role in learning. It’d be very difficult for humans to manage if they retained everything they ever learned. Yet, we consciously do very little forgetting. We often create learning solutions that are required to learn procedures. I wonder if in addition to helping people learn, we need to include some elements that assist individuals in forgetting obsolete procedures."
Author: Abhijit Kadle, Upside Learning Blog, Feb 6, 2012

From an "interview Robert Bjork, the director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, a distinguished professor of psychology, and a massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out."
1. Interleaving - focus on practicing different mini-skills, rather than trying to master one skill before moving on the next.
2. Vary your study location.
3. Spaced practice. Consider "taking notes just after class, rather than during — forcing yourself to recall a lecture’s information is more effective than simply copying it from a blackboard. You have to work for it. The more you work, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more awesome you can become."
4. Forget about forgetting.
Author: Garth Sundem, Wired Magazine, Jan 29, 2012

Describes what happens with a memory lapse of something you know what what you can and shouldn't do if you want to try to retrieve it.
Author: Christian Jarrett, The Guardian, Nov 11, 2011

"People who are good at forgetting information they don't need are also good at problem solving and at remembering something when they're being distracted with other information. This shows that forgetting plays an important role in problem solving and memory".
Author: ScienceDaily, Oct 18, 2011

"During childhood and adolescence, children develop the ability to remember not only past events but the origin of those memories. For example, someone may remember meeting a particular person and the context in which he or she met that person. New research from Germany has found that the ability to remember the origin of memories is a relatively long process that matures during adolescence but isn't fully developed until adulthood. The study, by researchers at Saarland University, appears in the journal Child Development. Its findings have implications for the legal arena in terms of the reliability of children's testimony."
Author: ScienceDaily, August 31, 2011

"A Cochrane review (of 24 trials over 37 years that had 2,229 subjects), found that there was 'surprisingly little evidence' supporting the use of cognitive training programs for memory improvement compared to other activities for people age 60 or older, with or without mild cognitive impairment (MCI). ... Would you prefer to do or learn something that is truly meaningful to you (for example, learn a language) or engage in a training program designed without that consideration (as most are, especially the commercial ones)?"

About memory: "1) as best as we know now, memories are not stored in the brain like photographs or audio recordings of events; memories are recreated when they accessed; 2) memory is unreliable; 3) false memories are common. ... Are there real repressed memories? Yes, there are. Repressed memories are always linked with traumatic events. Sometimes sufficiently traumatic events can overwhelm a person’s ability to function, such as what happens when someone goes into shock. These strong emotions and associated stress hormones can overwhelm the brain, interfering with the memory system. However, in practical experience, there is little evidence that these types of memories (i.e., those that are repressed) can be reliably recovered years down the road. It has happened, but is extremely rare."
Author: Jared Tanner, Briad Blogger, undated (appears to be July 14, 2011 based on the comments)

What happens if athletes get 10 hours of sleep each night? 11 players from Stanford's varsity basketball team tried it. "The players didn't quite make it to 10 hours, but they did add more than 90 minutes of sleep time, and the results were noticeable. Collectively, they took almost a full second off of their times in 282-foot sprints on a basketball court - that's equivalent to the length of a court three times - and they improved the accuracy of both their free-throw and three-point shooting by 9 percent. '"What these findings suggest is that these athletes were operating at a sub-optimal level. They'd accumulated a sleep debt," said Cheri Mah, a researcher at the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and lead author of the study" which was published in the journal Sleep. Still "too much sleep can be just about as bad for overall health as too little, research has shown. That's why most people should aim for seven to nine hours, said Dr. Anil Rama, medical director of the Sleep Medicine Laboratory at Kaiser San Jose."

"Create smart online flash cards that predict when you'll forget."

"Can advertising create fake memories about trying products that you have never actually experienced?" The answer: yes. "In a series of research studies ... consumers who read vivid print advertisements for fictitious products reported false memories of having tried these products, despite the fact that this would have been impossible. These consumers also evaluated the falsely remembered products as favourably as other consumers who actually did try the products."
Author: Privali Rajagopal and Nicole Votolato Montgomery, The Mark June 10, 2011

Author: Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, May 25, 2011

Easy ways to improve memory - tips based on research: (1) Write about your problems (2) Look at a natural scene (3) Say words aloud (4) Meditate (5) Predict your performance (6) Use your body to encode memories (7) Use your body to remember. For a bit more effort, exercise.
Author: PsyBlog, May 19, 2011

Science Daily, April 28, 2011

Author: Will Thalheimer

Summary of Cognitive Load theory (prominent names here are John Sweller, Frank Nguyen, and Ruth Clark) -- and tips for designing instruction so that you don't overload working memory.
Author: Jane Bozarth, Learning Solutions Magazine, August 3, 2010

Science Daily, April 18, 2011

"Senior citizens who spent their time restricted to their living quarters had a higher chance of developing dementia, a new study finds. Cynthia Graber reports."
Author: Cynthia Graber, Scientific American, April 18, 2011

Sleep helps memories move from working memory to long-term memory, but new research from University of Lübeck in Germany shows that it not automatic. Sleep is "helpful only if you know a test is coming or, more generally, if you explicitly tell yourself you’ll need the information in the future. ... EEGs found that the “test is coming” group spent more time in deep, slow-wave sleep than did the group not anticipating a test. Slow electrical waves act as a replay button, causing the hippocampus to reactivate new memories and synchronizing the neocortex so that it accepts them into long-term storage."
Author: Sharon Begley, Newsweek, Feb 13, 2011

"'If something is easy to process, you assume you will remember it well,' says [lead researcher Nate] Kornell. Second, there’s the 'stability bias': 'People act as though their memories will remain the same in the future as they are right now.' Wrong again. Actually, 'effortful processing' leads to more stable learning. And “the way we encode information is not based on ease; it’s based on meaning." We remember what is meaningful to us." Researchers Nate Kornell and Matthew G. Rhodes of Colorado State University, Alan D. Castel of University of California/Los Angeles, and Sarah K. Tauber of Kent State University conducted three experiments, each with about 80 participants from teenagers to senior citizens. To test the relationships between “metamemory”—or beliefs and judgments about memory—and performance.

This is the research article that Jonah Lehrer references in his Wired magazine article. "Previous research has shown that disfluency – the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognitive operations – leads to deeper processing." Studies of college and high school classes "found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting. ... The results suggest that superficial changes to learning materials could yield significant improvements in educational outcomes." (See also the Wired magazine article.)
Author: Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, Erikka B. Vaughan, the journal Cognition, accepted May 5, 2010

"Many education researchers and practitioners believe that reducing extraneous cognitive load is always beneficial for the learner. In other words, if a student has a relatively easy time learning a new lesson or concept, both the student and instructor are likely to label the session as successful ... Unfortunately, this assumption turns out to be mostly wrong, as numerous studies have found that making material harder to learn — what the researchers call disfluency — can actually improve long-term learning and retention" (See also the PDF of the research in the journal Cognition)
Author: Jonah Lehrer, Wired, Jan 5, 2011

In this article, Will Thalheimer examines 14 research article on how much people remember. Forgetting depends on many things: type of material that is being learned, learners’ prior knowledge, learners’ motivation to learn, power of the learning methods used, contextual cues in the learning and remembering situations, amount of time the learning has to be retained, difficulty of the retention test, etc. "Rules-of-thumb that show people forgetting at some pre-defined rate are just plain false. In other words, learning gurus and earnest bloggers are wrong when they make blanket statements like, 'People will forget 40% of what they learned within a day of learning it.' ... Learning interventions can produce profound improvements in long-term remembering. In other words, learning gurus are wrong when they say that training is not effective. Different learning methods produce widely different amounts of forgetting." Author: Will Thalheimer, Will at Work, Dec 14, 2010

Author: Psychology Today

Remembering the future. "There is a growing conviction within neuroscience that one of the human mind's chief preoccupations is prediction. Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm Computing who is now afull-time neuroscientist, argued in his 2004 book "On Intelligence" that the mind does this by detecting a familiar pattern in its input, then anticipating from past experience what usually follows. The more unexpected something is, the more conscious we are of it. ... Daniel Schacter of Harvard University has made the remarkable discovery that the same parts of the mind hold both our episodic memories and our imagined futures. That is to say, if asked to imagine some specific future event, people activate the very same regions of the brain as they do when asked to recall some particular past event."
Author: Matt Ridley, WSJ.com, Dec 11, 2010

How to change attitudes months after a persuasive message is delivered.
Author: Psyblog, Nov 29, 2010

"Elderly have better memory for 'irrelevant' information. ... A University of Toronto study shows that visual attention -- the brain’s ability to selectively filter unattended or unwanted information from reaching awareness -- diminishes with age, leaving older adults less capable of filtering out distracting or irrelevant information. Taylor Schmitz was the lead researcher. Results were published Nov. 3 in Journal of Neuroscience.
Author: Kim Luke, University of Toronto, Nov. 2, 2010

"[T]hose trained on video games do their jobs better, have
higher skills and retain information longer than workers learning in
less interactive, more passive environments.” Traci Sitzmann,
University of Colorado Denver School of Business "spent over a year
examining 65 studies and data from 6,476 trainees and discovered those
using video games had an 11 percent higher factual knowledge level, a
14 percent higher skill-based knowledge level and a 9 percent higher
retention rate than trainees in comparison groups.” Games are
“’intrinsically motivating, resulting in employees choosing to
repeatedly engage in game play and mastering the skills,’ Sitzmann
said.” Video games must not be “the only instruction. Employees must be
taught before and after the games to ensure they grasp the entire scope
of the job. Results will be published in the winter edition of
Personnel Psychology.
Author: University of Colorado Denver, Oct 19, 2010

Doodling on a piece of paper while listening to a boring
lecture or phone conversation actually helps concentration and can make
facts easier to recall" based on a study published in the journal
Applied Cognitive Phychology. "While the reason isn't known, Andrade
[Jackie Andrade, University of Plymouth] said the results show doodling
aids concentration. One possibility is that doodling reduces
daydreaming in situations where daydreaming might harm performance more
than scribbling on a piece of paper".
Author: CNN.com/europe, Feb 27, 2010

"Today´s 70-year-olds do far better in intelligence tests than their predecessors. It has also become more difficult to detect dementia in its early stages, though forgetfulness is still an early symptom, reveals new research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, based on the H70 study."
Author: Kathy James, Shrink Rap blog, Oct. 22, 2010

A star golfer misses a critical putt; a brilliant student
fails to ace a test; a savvy salesperson blows a key presentation. Each
of these people has suffered the same bump in mental processing: They
have just choked under pressure." According to University of Chicago
psychologist Sian Beilock, author of the book 'Choke: What the Secrets
of the Brain Revel About Getting It Right When You Have To' "they are
preventable results of information logjams in the brain." Why do we
choke: (1) Paralysis by analysis: either thinking too much about what
you are doing or worrying about failure. Singing or whistling may help
prevent choking in these situations.(2) Pressure-filled situations can
deplete a part of the brain’s processing power known as working memory.
Worrying depletes working memory. Practicing under stress can help, as
can focusing about what to say (vs. what not to say).
Author: University of Chicago News, Sept 21, 2010

In an article in Aging and Mental Health, Prof. Dov Shmotkin
of Tel Aviv University "found that people's well-being and their
adaptation can be ascertained by their 'time trajectory' — their
concept of how they have evolved through their remembered past,
currently perceived present, and anticipated future. ... In a study of
Holocaust survivors, Prof. Shmotkin separated these survivors into
those who considered the 'Holocaust as past' and those who conceived of
the 'Holocaust as present.' Those in the 'Holocaust as past' category
were able to draw an effective line between the present day and the
past trauma, thus allowing themselves to move forward. Those in the
'Holocaust as present' category considered their traumatic experience
as still existing, which indicated a difficulty in containing the
trauma within a specific time limit." This may be part the normal aging
process; when we're young we look to the future.
Author: American Friends of Tel Aviv University, Oct 11. 2010

"New research suggests that walking at least six miles per
week may protect brain size and in turn, preserve memory in old age,
according to a study published in the October 13, 2010, online issue of
Neurology ... For the study, 299 dementia-free people recorded how much
they walked in one week. Nine years later, people who walked 6-9 miles
per week had "greater gray matter volume than people who didn't walk as
much." After another 4 years, "The researchers found that those who
walked the most cut their risk of developing memory problems in half.
" Study author was Kirk I. Erickson, University of Pittsburgh.
Author: ScienceDaily.com, Oct 14, 2010

“Taking practice tests – particularly ones that involve
attempting to recall something from memory – can drastically increase
the likelihood that you’ll be able to remember that information again
later,” Dr. Katherine Rawson said. “Given that hundreds of experiments
have been conducted to establish the effects of testing on learning,
it’s surprising that we know very little about why testing improves
memory." In the article titled “Why Testing Improves Memory: Mediator
Effectiveness Hypothesis,” Rawson and Pyc reported an experiment
indicating that at least one reason why testing is good for memory is
that testing supports the use of more effective encoding strategies."
Author: Dept. of Psychology News, Kent State University, Oct 14, 2010

A University of Virginia study suggests that older adults are
not only more inclined than younger adults to make errors in
recollecting details that have been suggested to them, but are also
more likely than younger people to have a very high level of confidence
in their recollections, even when wrong. The finding has implications
regarding the reliability of older persons’ eyewitness testimonies in
courtrooms. The study, “I misremember it well: Why older adults are
unreliable eyewitnesses,” is published in a recent issue of the
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
Author: Univ. of Virginia News, Feb. 19, 2007

Simple motor actions, like moving marbles upward or downward
between two cardboard boxes, may not seem meaningful. But a study
published April 2010 in Cognition shows that motor actions can partly
determine people's emotional memories. Moving marbles upward caused
participants to remember more positive life experiences, and moving
them downward to remember more negative experiences, according to
Daniel Casasanto (MPI and Donders Institute, Nijmegen) and Katinka
Dijkstra (Erasmus University, Rotterdam).
Author: ScienceDaily, March 8, 2010

"A commercial brain fitness program has been shown to improve
memory in older adults, at least in the period soon after training. The
findings are the first to show that practicing simple visual tasks can
improve the accuracy of short-term, or “working” visual memory. The
research, led by scientists at UCSF, is also one of the first to
measure both mental performance and changes in neural activity caused
by a cognitive training program. ... The findings are the first to show
that practicing simple visual tasks can improve the accuracy of
short-term, or “working” visual memory." The research by Adam Gazzaley
is published in the journal PLoS One on July 14, 2010. The study
involved two sets of 15 healthy adults from age 60 to 89. One set took
10 hours of training on a computer game by Posit Science Corp.
Author: UCSF News Release, July 14, 2010

"The more an older woman weighs, the worse her memory,
according to new research from Northwestern Medicine. The effect is
more pronounced in women who carry excess weight around their hips,
known as pear shapes, than women who carry it around their waists,
called apple shapes. ... "The message is obesity and a higher Body Mass
Index (BMI) are not good for your cognition and your memory," said lead
author Diana Kerwin, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine and a
physician at Northwestern Medicine. "While the women's scores were
still in the normal range, the added weight definitely had a
detrimental effect."
Author: Science Daily, July 14, 2010

According to phychologist at Washington University in St.
Loius, people "who sleep after processing and storing a memory carry
out their intentions much better than people who try to execute their
plan before getting to sleep. The researchers have shown that sleep
enhances our ability to remember to do something in the future, a skill
known as prospective memory. ... our ability to carry out our
intentions is not so much a function of how firmly that intention has
been embedded in our memories. Rather, the trigger that helps carry out
our intentions is usually a place, situation or circumstance -- some
context encountered the next day -- that sparks the recall of an
intended action."
Author: Science Daily, July 6, 2010

The largest trial to date of 'brain-training' computer games
found there were no transfer effects to general cognition. In the BBC
study 11,430 volunteers (ages 18-60) completed a series of online tasks
for a minimum of 10 minutes a day, 3 times a week, for 6 weeks. In one
group, the tasks focused on reasoning, planning and problem-solving. A
second group focused on functions targeted by commercial brain-training
programs: short-term memory, attention, visuospatial abilities and
math. A third group used the Internet to find answers to obscure
questions. “There were absolutely no transfer effects from the training
tasks to more general tests of cognition”, says Adrian Owen, a
neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and
Brian Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, who led the study. However, Peter
Snyder, a neurologist who studies ageing at Brown University said “I
really worry about this study—I think it's flawed”. Author: Alla
Katsnelson, Nature News, April 20, 2010

About spaced learning.
Author: Hal Pashler, Doug Rohrer, and Nicholas J. Cepeda, APS Observer website, March 2006.

"Have you ever been asked a question that you know the answer
to, but found yourself struggling to think of the correct word? "Oh, I
know this," you might say. "I know that it starts with a B." While it
may be tempting to spend some time struggling to find the answer,
research by psychologist Karin Humphreys and Amy Beth Warriner suggests
that the more time you spend trying to remember a word on the tip of
your tongue actually makes it more likely that you'll struggle with the
word again in the future." Instead, it's better to look up the answer.
Author: Kendra Cherry, About.com, April 18, 2009

These reports are great at showing how to put research into practice.
* "Measuring Learning Results: Creating fair and valid assessments..." Talks about how and when to do an assessment (which isn't at the end of a course).
* Providing Learners With Feedback -- "feedback is not as important as retrieval practice in supporting later learning."
* Aligning the Learning and Performance Contexts
* How Much Do People Forget?
* Using Linguistically, Culturally, and Situationally Appropriate Scenarios to Support Real-World Remembering
* Spacing Learning - great report on this under-utilized technique

This article has tips for learners -- memory and learning tips. It's not ways to design training.
Author: Scott H Young

Implications of Sleep-Dependent Learning and Plasticity for Skill Performance
Matthew P. Walker, PhD and Robert Stickgold, PhD
Published in Clinics in Sports Medicine, 2005

Superstitious charms and rituals actually do improve
performance in several studies. In one study where participants built
words from letters, those who had their "lucky charm" wih them
persisted longer (12 min. vs. 7 min) and found 50% more words due to
greater confidence. The group with the lucky charms also performed
better on a memory (find-the-matching-cards test).
Author: Matthew Hutson, Psychology Today, Feb. 11, 2010.

"We found that older brains are not only less likely to
suppress irrelevant information than younger brains, but they can link
the relevant and irrelevant pieces of information together and
implicitly transfer this knowledge to subsequent memory tasks," said
Karen Campbell, PhD student at University of Toronto.
Author: Science Daily, Jan. 25, 2010

A neuroscientist's describes compensating for limited working memory
Author: Eide Neurolearning Blog, Feb. 8, 2010

The U.S. Office of Naval Research has found that when it comes
to fighting wars around the world, gamers are more capable at taking on
the enemy than nongamers. According to Ray Perez, a program officer in
the ONR's warfighter performance department who discussed the findings
in the Pentagon Web Radio Webcast, gamers perform "10 [percent] to 20
percent higher, in terms of perceptual and cognitive ability, than
normal people that are non-game players."
Perez went on to say that his office has found that video games
"increase perpetual abilities and short-term memory." Games also help
people focus longer.
Author: Don Reisigner, CNET News, Jan. 27, 2010.

A good explanation on how memory works including sensory
buffer, short-term memory, long-term memory, and semantic, eposodic and
procedural memory.
Author: James Atherton, Nov. 4, 2009

Not providing printed copies of notes at a conference can
hinder learning. "Note-taking can prompt learners to engage in deep
processing of their learning. By organizing the learning content during
note-taking, learners will be more likely to fully understand what
they're learning and remember it later. Note-taking has other benefits
as well. Learners can go back and study their notes at a later time,
providing themselves with spaced repetitions---a proven aid to
long-term remembering. Finally, learners who take notes may be more
likely to attempt to share what they've learned with others when they
return to work. The process of preparing to teach others, provides
further deep processing of the learning material and makes it more
likely that the learning content will be remembered and utilized on the
job."
Author: Will Thalheimer, Will at Work Learning, Jan. 30, 2010.

"...psychological scientists from the University of Rochester,
Matthew Dye, Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier, looked at all of the
existing literature on video gaming and found .. that avid players got
faster not only on their game of choice, but on a variety of unrelated
laboratory tests of reaction time." Also, "Gamers don't lose accuracy
(in the game or in lab tests) as they get faster. The scientists
believe that this is a result of the gamer's improved visual cognition.
Playing video games enhances performance on mental rotation skills,
visual and spatial memory, and tasks requiring divided attention."
Author: Science Daily, Dec. 18, 2009

List of links to articles and essays about using music in classroom instruction. Seems to be focused on K-12. Includes links to "The Effect of Baroque Music on the Performance of Elementary Students on Problem Solving Task" and "The Mind, Music, and Behavior."
Author: OPPapers.com

Early results from a study of high-performing executives. "In
the study, the most frequently found Executive Skills in
high-performing individuals are Working Memory, Organization, and
Planning/Prioritization. The top three weak Executive Skills found are
Task Initiation, Emotion Control, and Stress Tolerance."
Author: NFI Research, Sept. 2009.

"By relating subtle eye movements to activity in the brain,
researchers in California have shown that ... the hippocampus can
retrieve memories of past events or experiences – even when people have
no conscious recollection of them." Researchers: Deborah Hannula and
Charan Ranganath of the University of California, Davis
Published in Neuron, vol 63, p 592.
Author: Peter Aldhous, New Scientist, Sept. 9, 2009.

Podcast (you can read the transcript). Kids are better than
adults at forgetting bad memories. "Now scientists think they know why.
According to an animal study in the September 4th issue of the journal
Science, the brains of adults erect physical barriers that keep painful
memories intact."
Author: Karen Hopkin, Scientific American, Sept. 4, 2009.

Can games improve fluid intelligence? "Fluid intelligence
refers to the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently
of previously acquired knowledge." Can training improve fluid
intelligence? ".... long history of research on cognitive training in
psychological and educational science ... [shows that] although
performance on trained tasks can increase dramatically, transfer of
this learning to other tasks or domains remains shockingly rare." Some
theories suggest that working memory and intelligence are constrained
by the number of items that can be held in working memory or the number
of interrelationsships among elements of a reasoning task. Results of
testing 70 participants on a dual-one-back game improved their fluid
intelligence scores. (You can play a game based on this at Lumosity.)
Author: Susanne M. Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, John Jonides, and Walter
J. Perrig, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA
(PNAS), February 7, 2008.

"A new study suggests that people who often do multiple tasks
in a variety of media -- texting, instant messaging, online video
watching, word processing, Web surfing, and more -- do worse on tests
in which they need to switch attention from one task to another than
people who rarely multitask in this way."
NOTE: The distracting, barely related links at the end of some paragraphs is distracting and annoying.
Author: Theresa Tamkins, CNNhealth.com, Aug. 25, 2009.

"The British Psychological Society will launch a set of
guidelines developed to provide people who work in law with the latest
scientific evidence to consider issues relating to memory. The report
is the culmination of an international working group set up by the
Research Board of the British Psychological Society to study the latest
evidence on human memory and how that evidence could be of use to the
legal professions."
Author: Medical News Today, July 11, 2008.