Starting in 1955, Werner and her colleagues studies 698 children born on Kauai, Hawaii in a given period. They were followed up at the ages of 2, 10, 18 and 31-32.

Werner became interested in 72 ‘vulnerable’ children. They had been exposed before the age of two to four or more of the following risk factors:

Reproductive stress (pregnancy or delivery)

Discordant and impoverished home lives (divorce, uneducated, alcoholic or mentally disturbed parents)

Despite their early exposure to these risk factors, these children went on to develop healthy personalities, stable careers and strong interpersonal relationships. As babies, these resilient children were typically described as active, affectionate, cuddly and easy going with an even tempered. They had no eating or sleeping habits causing distress to their carers. These are all temperamental characteristics which elicit positive responses from both family members and strangers.

There were also environmental differences between the resilient and non-resilient children. These included smaller family size, at least two years between themselves and the next child, and a close attachment to at least one carer. They also received considerable emotional support from outside the family, were popular with peers, and had at least one close friend. School became a refuge from the disordered household.

62 of the resilient children were studied after reaching their 30s. As a group, they seemed to be coping well with demands of adult life. 75% had received some college education; nearly all had full-time jobs and were satisfied with their work. According to Werner: ‘As long as the balance between the stressful life events and protective factors is favourable, successful adaptation is possible. When stressful events outweigh the protective factors, however, even the most resilient child can have problems’.  

Siblings share both genes and environment and therefore the same nature and nurture factors, but yet siblings are often so different. In theory, siblings sharing the same nature and nurture conditions should be incredibly similar. However this is not the case, as we are well aware by thinking about how opposite you may be to your own siblings. This challenges both views, genetic (nature) and environmental (nurture).

Twin studies
Research of monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins gives evidence supporting the nature argument–MZ twins share a great deal more similarities than DZ twins do. MZ twins are genetically identical; DZ twins, in the same way as regular siblings, share 50% of the same genetic material. However, twins also share the same nurturing environment from the point of fertilization, so surely nurture can’t be what accounts for the difference between twins?

Twins reared apart
If the similarities between MZ twins was to be as a result of nurture, then it would be expected that MZ twins reared apart would be very different. Studies of twins reared apart however, have shown just the opposite and give much support to the idea that the similarities in twins is as a result of nature. The Minnesota twin study concluded that, ‘on multiple measures of personality and temperament, occupational and leisure-time interests, and social attitudes, MZ twins reared apart are about as similar as MZ twins reared together’. Other findings also support this conclusion; Bouchard and McGue (1981) found that MZ twins reared apart had a mean correlation of 0.72 (compared to 0.86 for reared together). Siblings reared together were 0.47 compared with 0.24 for reared apart–showing some environmental component. These studies although supporting that the majority of similarities between MZ twins is thanks to nature, they fail to explain the proportion not accounted for by nature. Studies of adopted children also draw the same/similar conclusions about nature’s influence of these factors.

Unshared environments
Although siblings can be said to share identical environments (i.e. same home, same family etc), this isn’t really accurate. Individuals in the same home have different experiences which creates different environments. So this could explain for the differences between twins not accounted for by nature. The different environments which individuals have is called the ‘unshared environment’, and can be influenced by age, gender, peer influences, hobbies etc. Furthermore, there are chance factors such as illness and accidents, that shape each of us–these are forces of unshared nurture. So if this is so important, why is it so often overlooked? Research has shown that our own natural characteristics will create our own unshared, microenvironment which is related to these innate characteristics. This means, that it all comes back around to the influence of nature. Your innate characteristics shape your environment, which in return shapes your development. This leads us to believe that nature and nurture are actually inseparable.

Nature and nurture as inseparable
The classic example of this is that of phenylketonuria, an inherited metabolic disorder preventing an individual with this disorder to be unable to metabolise phenylalanine, resulting in a buildup of poisonous substances that cause brain damage. If this illness is detected at birth, the individual can alter their environment, to have a diet which avoids phenylalanine and thus prevents the potential brain damage. Nature (phenylketonuria) is not expressed because of an altered environment. Blakemore and Cooper’s 1970 study of perceptual development in kittens, also shows evidence that nurture (the environment in which you live) can have a profound effect on the development of innate systems.

So, why are siblings so different if they share the same genes and similar environments?
It is clear that the differences in siblings which are not accounted for by genetics are as a result of our unshared environments, while sibling similarities are largely, if not completely, as a result of nature. The unshared environment deserves our attention, it is the environment that is unique to each individual and leads us to explore nature and nurture in a different way. We should also be aware of the extent to which nature creates its own nurture.

Intelligence is notoriously difficult to define, however most experts agree that it is the ability to adapt and function effectively within a given environment. This definition is broad, and also allows us to consider that other animals posses “intelligence”.

Ecological explanations for human intelligence

Compared with other animals, primates in general have larger brains, and in order for us to fully understand human intelligence, we must first ask why the primate we have evolved from started off with such large brains?

Ecological explanations suggest that solving the problems of efficient foraging led to an increase in brain size. Evidence from fossils tell us that early primates were arboreal (tree living) and frugivorous (fruit eaters), and so solving the issues that come attached to having to move within their environment lead to larger and more cognitively evolved brains. Richard Byrne stated that early primates were effective at producing detailed cognitive maps as a result of this need to forage for food.

Around 14 million years ago, equatorial Africa began to shrink, opening up vast grasslands and savannahs. Consequently our ancestors had to begin to explore a wider range of food substances like meat. Whether the primates were “elbowed out” of the jungle environment by competitors, or whether they were better able to move on land than other species is strongly debated, however regardless of which event occurred, this change played a crucial role in human evolution

Then around 6 million years ago the common ancestor of humans and the chimpanzee split. The chimpanzees remained as they were, and the others became fully adapted to living in open plains. Becoming more fully adapted meant becoming:

• More upright
• More cooperative

Both in order to fashion tools and engage in group hunting.

The main premise of this explanation is that the evolution of human intelligence consists of two stages, the demand for foraging and the demand for hunting, both of which provided the problems that natural selection solved via creating a bigger, more intelligent brain.

Social complexity explanations for human intelligence

There are various different hypotheses surrounding this concept, however all of they agree on the key idea that predicting and dealing with the behaviour of others in a social group is the primary cause of our increased level of intelligence.

Nick Humphrey was the first to introduce this idea. He suggested that the most intelligent species (dolphins, chimpanzees, elephants) are, almost invariably, the most social. So it is not the problems of the physical environment but social ones that caused the evolution of intelligence.

This idea was developed by Richard Byrne and Andy Whitten, who composed the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. This hypothesis said that individuals can best achieve their own aims by predicting and manipulating the people they encounter. This supported the claim that the driving force for a large intelligent brain is the ability to read the minds of other people in the group and use this information to your advantage. The most important feature of this hypothesis is the ability to “impute states of minds to others”. In context, when we tell the truth, we simply report the facts of how things are. However to deceive and lie, we must first be able to work out what the other person is thinking. So once we possess the ability to glean insight into another person’s mind, we will have an advantage in being able to predict the actions of others, be it hostile or friendly.

Overall the social explanation of intelligence defines it as our ability to predict the actions or mind sets of other people. Evolution in this sense is not about getting nicer, but is about winning the competition in order to pass genes on, which is why the more social animals have become more intelligent and have effectively won the competition over the years to the point where humans have evolved to become a dominant species.

The function of the neo-cortex

The social explanation also has scientific evidence regarding the neo-cortex, the outer layer of the brain. Robin Dunbar observed primates and noted that the increase in brain size compared to other mammals is largely down to an increase in the size of the neo-cortex. He established that:

• The larger the social groups of primates, the more time they spend grooming each other
• The larger the social group, the larger the neo-cortex

Putting these facts together, Dunbar suggested that grooming helps to maintain social bonds, and a larger neo-cortex is essential to recognising individuals and interacting with them in a large social group.

It is worth noting that the neo-cortex is the part of our brain that deals with higher functions such as decision making and predicting the outcome of our actions – in other words this is the part of our brain responsible for our intelligence

So on this basis we can see that the more social animals such as dolphins or elephants become more intelligent as a result of the development of the neo-cortex, which is needed for them to recognise and interact with individuals in their larger social groups. This supports the social explanation for the evolution of human intelligence, and its scientific validity means this hypothesis is strongly supported.

An experiment, carried out by Plomin, linked the gene IGF2R, located on chromosome 6, with the intelligence trait. This intelligence trait is sourced similarly to physical characteristics such as eye colour and blood type, where one, of the 23 pairs of chromosomes, causes the protein to be manufactured so that characteristics are present. Unlike eye colour, the intelligence trait is polygenetic which means that a number of genes act together in combination to become an actuality. This finding could ultimately be used as a way to predict an individual’s intelligence.

Plomin was able to do this though carrying out an investigation that analysed the gene pool of a select group of children who had very high IQ’s and comparing them with the chromosomes of children who had an average IQ. The gene IGF2R was found in 17% of children with average intelligence however, 33% of those with high IQ’s were found to have that gene – over double. Although this is only a third of the children, the gene can be confidently linked to intelligence due to a significant increase in percentage when compared to those with an average IQ. Those who were considered bright yet did not have the IGF2R gene most likely had a different intelligence gene due to polygenic nature of the trait. It was suggested that a higher accumulation of intelligence gene within an individual’s chromosomes would result in that person being more intelligent as critically the more intelligence genes you had the smarter the individual. These findings suggest a strict nature perspective on the formation of intelligence.

However, this may not be the case. This research suggests that genes play a large role in an individual’s intelligence yet it is also thought that the trait is the outcome of both nature and nurture. An argument in favour of this is that the intelligence genes path a ‘reaction range’ that set the minimal and aspirational intelligence levels of an individual. Depending on each person’s environment and childhood where they ultimately fall within the range will form.  For example, a child from a first world country, who shares the same number of intelligence genes as an individual from a third world country, will achieve more highly due to their environment.

Yet this realisation has awoken some ethical dilemma that regards ‘designer babies’. It is possible to abort a child with Down syndrome, with around 750 such terminations being carried out each year, due to mental retardation that is associated with it. This advance in understanding, of the intelligence gene, could be used to discover a child’s level of intelligence prior to birth. Hence, begging the question would people decide to end their child’s life because they were likely to have below average IQ?

Intelligence is often tested through IQ tests; this is seen to be the case in this particular study as Plomin is concerned by how well individuals score in an IQ test rather than their actual intelligence. If it is found that the basic principles for the IQ test are ethnocentric then all research based off of it is immediately flawed.

It is a general idea that intelligence increases as we older, until a certain point where it then begins to decline, but is this true?

This simply comes down to how we measure intelligence. Comparing the results of someone aged 20 with someone aged 40 on the same intelligence test would give different results, the 40 year old is likely to achieve a higher score than the 20 year old- but does this make them more intelligent? intelligence can be seen as relative to age, and so the 20 year old may achieve a lower score than the 40 year old, but they are still smarter in comparison with their own age group than the 40 year old is with theirs.

Intelligence also comes in different forms, which are affected differently by age. Crystallised intelligence is the knowledge than an individual has already learnt, and so is solidified in their memory. Whereas fluid intelligence is an individual’s ability to learn new information and tackle new problems. As we get older our crystallised intelligence does not decline, and may actually improve, as we have more experiences  and so have gained more knowledge through these. however our fluid intelligence begins to decline as we lose ability to pick up new skills and then apply them. This causes issues when studying aging and intelligence as general knowledge tests tend to be biased in favour of crystallized intelligence-  so the older participants are at an unfair disadvantage.

It may also be thought that physical factors can affect intelligence. As we get older more health problems begin to arise, as if an individual experiences issues that affect their cardiovascular and metabolic functions then this can have negative effects on their intellectual performance. Older participants are also more likely to have health problems that limit their ability to get down the knowledge that they have, this is especially an issue in timed tests as it may take someone older a longer time to write a set of answers than someone younger, even if their thought processes are unaffected.  The last factor that influences intelligence while aging is the frequency that the knowledge is visited. Someone who takes part in more complex activities is likely to keep their fluid intelligence for longer than someone who does not, as it is being exercised and practiced.

My name is Meghan, and I am a member of the eTREC Robotics team at East Troy High School.  I have been involved in robotics for five years, and I founded the eTREC team four years ago.  This year will be my last year because I am graduating in the spring.  

My robotics teammates and I participate in FIRST Tech Challenge (http://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/ftc), also known as FTC.  Each year in September, FIRST releases a video that tells us what our robot needs to be able to accomplish to earn points during competitions.  This year, we had to launch whiffle balls into baskets three feet off the ground, push buttons to change the color of a light, and lift a yoga ball in the air.  Robots don’t have to do everything, but the more your robot can do, the more points you earn during competitions.  Our robot can launch the whiffle balls and push the buttons, but not lift the yoga ball.  

Qualifying competitions happen every year during the month of January.  This year, my team competed at competitions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Hortonville, Wisconsin.  At the Hortonville tournament, my team scored enough points to advanced to the next level of competition.  FTC has four levels of competition: qualifying, state, super-regional, and world.  This coming weekend, my team and I will be competing at the state-level tournament in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Depending on how well we do there, we might be able to advance to the super-regional tournament in Iowa.  

Even if we don’t advance, it will still have been a great year.  Building a robot takes a lot of work, with every team member putting in roughly ten hours every week for five months.  Before we can start building, we have to brainstorm ideas and choose which ones we think have potential.  Then, we make prototypes of the ideas that tell us whether or not the idea will work.  If the prototype doesn’t work, we go back to our brainstorming and chose another idea that we test in the same manner.  If the prototype does work, then we design and build our final mechanism.  

I’m excited that my robotics team is going to state because that is a huge accomplishment, but I won’t be heartbroken if we don’t advance to the next level of competition.  For me, robotics is about learning how to design and build a working contraption and not about getting awards or winning competitions.  If you want to learn more about the eTREC Robotics team, visit our website (which I designed and maintain): www.etrecrobotics.com.

Article Link

In our Psychology class at East Troy High School, we are currently studying motivation and the psychology of hunger.  I found an interesting article that discusses this topic and the effects of the brain on hunger as opposed to the physiological aspect of hunger.  Both in class and in the article I have learned that in modern American society, people eat excessively more than they would need simply to survive.  People eat for many reasons, or for that matter, they don’t eat for many reasons as well.  The article discussed three types of cues that signal our drive to eat: external sensory cues, external normative cues, and social cues.

Sensations such as taste, sight, and cognition affect our desire to eat.  An experiment referenced in the article found that “the presentation of sensory cues significantly increased participants’ desire to eat”.  This makes a lot of sense considering many times, we don’t recognize we are hungry (or have the desire to eat) until we see something that looks good or smells good.

External normative cues consist of portion sizes and memory for recent eating.  In American culture, it is usually expected that you finish the food you’re served on your plate.  Because of this, even if you’re not hungry enough to finish a big portion, you still might eat it anyways.  America generally presents food in large servings that encourage excessive eating.

Social influences also affect our eating habits.  Even if we’re not hungry, if everyone around us is eating, we are more likely to eat as well.  Eating with other people in general increases the amount we eat, despite our level of hunger.  On the other hand, social expectations can discourage people from eating.  Eating disorders are a psychological condition, and societal standards can create unhealthy eating habits.

Eating Disorders

• Anna Bower

In America, one in two hundred women will suffer from anorexia nervosa in her lifetime. For bulimia nervosa that number is three in one hundred women. Specifically speaking, women in universities have a one in ten chance of having a clinical or nearly clinical eating disorder. Unfortunately, these disorders are vastly misunderstood and often carry stigma with them.

Eating disorders are complex conditions that are deeply rooted in biological, social, and psychological factors. Research states that common risk factors seen throughout all eating disorders include overall biological dissatisfaction, dieting, familial pressure, low self-esteem, higher childhood BMI, and maladaptive coping. Similar but more specific risk factors can be observed in the most common eating disorders anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder.

• Anorexia nervosa is described as an unhealthy relationship with food that involves severe underrating of food that leads to a weight that is too low. It usually comes with an intense fear of gaining or maintaining their current weight. The National Eating Disorder foundation describes anorexia nervosa as a subdivided eating disorder that can be restrictive- limiting food intake, or purging- self induced vomiting.
• Bulimia nervosa can be described as having frequent episodes of binge eating episodes followed by self-induced vomiting. People that suffer from bulimia nervosa often suffer from an external locus of control about eating, such as that eating must happen to satisfy feelings of shame or discomfort.
• Binge eating disorder is often compared to bulimia nervosa in that frequent episodes of binge eating do occur however they are not followed by behaviors to prevent weight gain. This often leads to people having extremely low self esteem that can be linked to feeling shameful or out of control about their eating.

Treatment of eating disorders is a long term treatment that works to aide those to learn to live with a healthy relationship with food. Often it is a multi-caregiver endeavor that can include psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, nutritionists, and medical doctors.

How to improve your memory

Rachel Davey

Organisation

Brewer et al showed the importance of organisation in memory. All participants had to learn and remember 112 words however in one condition the words were presented in an organised way, reflecting the participant’s knowledge and in the other condition they were presented randomly. There was a big difference between the two groups and memory in the organised condition was three and a half times better. It is typically very useful to organise the material at the time of learning. However, this can lead to errors as the organisational structure on we impose on the learning material can cause us to remember everything relevant to that structure, whether it was presented or not.

Visual Imagery

The method of loci. To use this method, you need to think of several locations you know well, for example your home. Then you think of ten items and imagine them in those locations.

E.g. if the first item is a balloon, you might imagine it hanging from your front door. If the second item is an elephant you might imagine it completely blocking your hall, and so on.

This method is effective but has limitations. For instance, it is difficult to recall any given item without laboriously working your way through the list until you come to it.

Verbal Method

The story method is a verbal technique used to remember a series of unrelated words in the correct order by linking them together within the context of a story. For example, if you wanted to learn the words battleship, pig and chair. You could make a story out of it: In the kitchen of the battleship, there was a pig sitting in a chair. Bower et al gave the participants the task of recalling 12 lists of ten words, in the correct order. Those who had formed stories recalled seven times as many words as those who had not. Although it is effective, the story method is limited in that it is time consuming to form a story. Also, you would have to work through the story to find a given item.

Mind Maps

A mind map is a visual summary diagram. Words, ideas and pictures are all connected to the centre via a series of lines to indicate their relationship towards each other. Nesbit and Adescope found that students who used mind maps consistently showed increased knowledge across all the subjects.

There are various reasons why mind maps are effective in improving memory:

• They require students to be actively involved in the learning process.
• Drawing links between the concepts within mind maps makes it easier for the learner to organise the material effectively.
• Mind maps provide visual images that assist the learning process.

Why do they work?

Ericsson argues that the way to achieve high memory performance is by doing three things:

• The information you want to be remember should be processed in a meaningful way by relating it to your existing knowledge- well known locations, connections between concepts etc.…
• You need to be able to access the to-be-remembered information at the time of recall. The best way to do this is to store cues with the information to assist in retrieval- the loci method.
• Extensive practice allows the processes at the time of learning and retrieval to function increasingly efficiently.

Conclusions:

There are several strategies that have worked in improving memory, however most of these strategies work best in certain conditions and may be little or no value under any other conditions. By contrast, repeated testing has been found to produce large increases in long-term memory across a wide range of conditions.

H.M. The Man with No Memory

By Gemma and Jess

Henry Molaison’s Condition

Henry Molaison suffered a brain injury at the age of 7 which began a lifetime of severe epileptic seizures which worsened over time. By the time he was 20, he was having uncontrollable grand mal attacks (health threatening seizures) and it was at this point doctors decided to attempt a brain operation of which may cure his epilepsy.

The Operation

This brain operation was one of high risk. It involved removing and altering parts of the brain that the doctors believed were causing these life threatening seizures, however the consequences of these actions were catastrophic.

The doctors during the operation removed a part of the brain called the hippocampal region of the brain, of which house several memory circuits, however doctors did not know this at the time. Along with extensive damage to the inner part of the temporal lobes which was also caused by the operation, Henry woke up from the operation suffering from amnesia and severe memory loss.

However given that this was a result of an operation and not a brain disease, this was a very pure form of amnesia, meaning every other intellectual function in the brain was intact. So whilst Henry had no capacity to remember things, his IQ was still above average and he still possessed his language and perceptual skills. This made Henry a very unique case for neuroscientists to study, and he was a research participant from the day before his operation in 1953 until he died in 2008.

What we learnt from Henry

Henry’s case brought on three major scientific discoveries regarding cognitive functions. The first of these was that memory was compartmentalised, and that memory is processed by specialist brain circuits. This effectively means a person is able to have no capacity for memorising information, and yet still be highly intelligent. The second is that the hippocampal region is essential for the ability to store long term memory, which was learnt though the consequences of Henry’s operation. It told us the hippocampus and the cortex surrounding it are where new memories are formed, and this ability to memorise information is localised to only this area. The third discovery it provoked was that not all kinds of memory or learning are affected by amnesia; there are different kinds of
memory in different locations in the brain. This idea began with a study by Brenda Milner in 1962 and since then studies like this have cemented the idea of multiple memory circuits.

Types of long-term memory:

From H.M. scientists were able to identify and differentiate two key types of long-term memory in the brain.

• Declarative (explicit) – This type of learning occurs with awareness, and is the conscious retrieval of events that occurred at a specific place or time. It is also associated with the conscious retrieval of facts such as general knowledge to the extent at which you can state what you know.
• E.g. you are able to state what you had for dinner last night.
• Non-declarative (implicit) – This is a non conscious type of memory storage, in which we demonstrate what we remember through the performance of a task. You learn without awareness and simply show off what you know when completing everyday tasks.
• E.g. riding a bike or playing tennis.

What Henry could/couldn’t do

Henry’s declarative learning was severely impaired. This meant that when test stimuli were verbal in testing his episodic memory, his severe impairment in doing so was very apparent. For example, when attempting to recall features of a short story he heard, his immediate score was 4.5 out of 23 points, which fell to 0 out of 23 after just an hour. His deficit in this area was also clear when using visual stimuli, his ability to recall a drawing was incredibly poor.

As well as his episodic memory being impaired, his semantic memory capabilities were also poor—acquiring new facts, concepts and vocabulary. He was not successful at all in an experiment which attempted to teach him eight new words.

Henry remembered very little about his every day environment, things as simple as where his bedroom was, or what clothes belonged to him, he did not remember. The studies and research into Henry’s condition and abilities strongly confirm that both episodic and semantic learning rely heavily on medial temporal lobe structures.

Despite his incapability with his declarative learning, Henry’s non-declarative learning was preserved after his operation. Information which he had learned unconsciously, like using his walking frame, he could remember. He learned the process of skills which had to take place for him to use the walking frame—getting up from a chair into the frame, then moving it along the floor, and then transferring from the frame back to a chair—unconsciously. However, he had no conscious knowledge of why he had to use the walker and so would sometimes forget he needed it resulting in him attempting to walk without it and falling.

Henry’s preserved learning of non-conscious tasks, like motor skill learning, shows that underlying computations depend on the brain circuits that weren’t damaged in Henry’s operation (i.e. outside of the hippocampal region.)

Knowing Henry

By talking to the people who Henry went to high school with, researchers were able to confirm that his operation and brain damage did not affect his personality. They all described him the same way that the scientists who knew him closely remember him, as a gentleman, who was quiet and kept to himself but was polite and gentle with a great respect for women. When asked about how he felt about taking part in all the tests that he did, he would respond saying that he is happy to do whatever he can to help other people. So although he had no conscious knowledge of what was ‘wrong’ with him, he knew that the lab that he visited and the tests which he took part in were for research that could benefit others.

Ethical considerations for this study

‘Is this ground breaking science or cruel exploitation of a man whose life was ruined by experimental surgery?’ Henry was not aware of what was being done, what he was taking part in or why he was doing so because of his condition, so although he is reported to always agree to take part and followed orders indefinitely, can this really be counted as informed consent? The studies, he endured for 40 years with no complaint, but he really had no memory of anything that would give him motive to disagree to anything.

Despite the common belief that Henry’s operation was the only one of its kind, in actual fact this procedure had been carried out several times before and the results could have been reasonably expected. The surgeon had been pioneering this technique on psychiatric patients and knew the risks and the likelihood of the damage which could be caused as a result of the operation. And so, the actual procedure which Henry went under, also raises the ethical issues concerning the conduct of doctors and their monitoring by their colleagues.