Within psychology, general cognitive ability (GCA, a hard skill) has, historically, been considered a major individual differences contributor to educational and economic outcomes. Recently, researchers from several disciplines, including Industrial/Organizational Psychology, Economics, Developmental Psychology and Sociology have begun to question the primacy accorded GCA. Specifically, soft (i.e., non- cognitive) skills such as personality and motivational factors are increasingly seen as important contributors to social outcomes, in some cases even outweighing the contribution of GCA. In this talk I will make use of several large-scale longitudinal twin and adoption studies undertaken at the University of Minnesota to address the following questions about the origins of individual differences in social outcomes:

1) What is the relative contribution of hard and soft skills?

2) How do hard and soft skills contribute to intergenerational social mobility?

3) To what extent are the contributions of hard and soft skills genetically and environmentally mediated and can we identify the specific factors that underlie these effects?

Throughout most of the talk I will focus on one social outcome, attaining a college degree, but will provide preliminary findings and discuss the relevance the relevance of findings on education for other social outcomes (e.g., employment, financial independence).

Suggested readings:

Rietveld, C. a. et al. (2013) GWAS of 126,559 Individuals Identifies Genetic Variants Associated with Educational Attainment. Science 340(6139):1467–71

Matt McGue, Aldo Rustichini, and William G. Iacono, Cognitive, (2015) Non-Cognitive And Family Background Contributions To College Attainment: A Behavioral Genetic Perspective (in press, available upon request)

 

People learn new knowledge through text comprehension, store this knowledge in memory, retrieve it during subsequent comprehension, and apply it to make inferences. A complete understanding of these processes requires a rapprochement between research on memory and learning and research on text comprehension. Towards this goal, I will argue (1) that models of long-term memory provide sufficient explanations of how knowledge is learned through text comprehension, and conversely (2) that moving from simple word lists to richly structured texts generates new insights into the basic mechanisms of memory and learning.

I will discuss two sets of experiments investigating scripts, which are schemas for stereotypical social events such as dining in a restaurant. The first set applies paradigms from the implicit learning (i.e., artificial grammar learning) literature, and the second set applies paradigms from the concepts and categorization literature. The key methodological development is a new technique for mapping the artificial stimulus structures of memory and learning paradigms to naturalistic texts about interesting and novel topics.

The implications of this research for future work at the intersection of memory, learning, knowledge representation, and text comprehension will be discussed.

Suggested readings:

• Cleeremans, A., Destrebecqz, A., & Boyer, M. (1998). Implicit learning : news from the front, 2(10), 587-590.
• Goldstone, RL & Kersten A (2003) Concepts and Categorization. In AF Healy & RW Proctor (Eds) Comprehensive Handbook of Psychology. Vol. 4 Experimental psychology, 599-621. New Jersey: Wiley.
• Bransford JD & Johnson MK, (1972) Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall, J Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior ii, 717-726

Experience with the environment dramatically influences how we act, think, and perceive; understanding the neural plasticity that supports such change is a long-standing goal in cognitive neuroscience. In the visual system, neural function alters dramatically as people adapt to changes in their visual world, such as increases or decreases in brightness or clarity. Most past work on visual adaptation, however, has altered visual input only over the short-term, typically a few minutes. I will present a series of experiments that investigate adaptation over a much longer term. My laboratory recently developed “altered reality” technology that allows subjects to live in, and adapt to, experimentally manipulated visual worlds for hours and days at a time. In order to characterize long-term visual plasticity, we used image manipulations that targeted early visual cortex, and measured adaptation with perceptual tests. Effects of adaptation grew stronger and longer-lasting as the adapting duration extended from minutes to hours to days. The long term adaptation was behaviorally distinguishable from shorter term adaptation, suggesting that it is controlled by novel neural mechanisms. "Classical" shorter-term adaptation appeared to reach a limit after about a day of adapting, likely due to costs associated with changing representations in early visual cortex. The multiple controllers of adaptation may allow vision to perform near optimally in an ever-changing world.

Suggested readings:

• Haak, K.V., Fast, E., Bao, M., Lee, M, & Engel, S.A. (2014). Four Days of Visual Contrast Deprivation Reveals Limits of Neuronal Adaptation. Current Biology, 24(21): 2575-2579.
• Bao M., & Engel S.A. (2012) Distinct mechanism for long-term contrast adaptation. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 109, 5898-903.

Despite pharmacological intervention, schizophrenia continues to be one of the most disabling illnesses worldwide. Developing interventions that lead to better role functioning and quality of life for individuals living with this condition is a health priority. Illness-related cognitive impairments contribute significantly to the prediction of disability, often contributing more than the severity of psychiatric symptoms. Consequently, in the last two decades, cognitive impairment, now recognized as a core aspect of the illness, has become an intervention target. Development of cognitively enhancing interventions has been ambitiously pursued with the hope that remediation or restoration of cognitive ability will lead to improved functional outcomes for these patients. An overview of this rapidly developing field will be presented highlighting recent innovations, critiques of the literature, and current challenges to the field. Findings from a recently completed randomized, double-blind, active placebo controlled clinical trial conducted by investigators at the Minneapolis VAHCS and the University of Minnesota will be presented.

Suggested readings:

• Haut, K. M., Lim, K. O., & MacDonald, A. (2010). Prefrontal cortical changes following cognitive training in patients with chronic schizophrenia: effects of practice, generalization, and specificity. Neuropsychopharmacology : Official Publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 35(9), 1850–9. http://doi.org/10.1038/npp.2010.52
• Saperstein AM, Kurtz MM (2013) Current trends in the empirical study of cognitive remediation for schizophrenia, Can J Psychiatry Jun;58(6):311-8.

The genetic determinants of aberrant brain activity in schizophrenia are largely unknown. To advance understanding of how genes influence brain abnormalities that predispose schizophrenia it is necessary to determine how specific genes are associated with neural deviation, and whether the associations are specific to schizophrenia. We tested whether reduced P300 brain responses were associated with the val allele of the COMT Val158Met SNP in schizophrenia, and whether this was also observed in bipolar disorder. The investigation included people with schizophrenia (PSZ) and their biological relatives (PSZ-rel), people with bipolar affective disorder (PBP) and their biological relatives (PBP-rel), and healthy controls (Ctrls). Analyses yielded Group-by-Genotype and Region-by-Group-by-Genotype interactions indicating that the five groups varied in their P300 responses depending on their COMT genotype as well as the region of scalp examined. COMT val homozygosity was associated with smaller P300 amplitudes in Ctrls. PSZ and PSZ-rels exhibited similar patterns of results with val homozygotes exhibiting diminished P300 amplitudes compared to the met homozygote counterparts at areas over the parietal cortex. PBP and PBP-rels showed opposite patterns of results. Although endophenotypic markers may show marginal diagnostic specificity, their associations with specific genes may be unique to select mental disorders.