Grammatical Collie - Diet & IQ - 10,000 Hours

[Marc Breedlove]

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350585/description/Dog_sniffs_out_grammar

Dog sniffs out grammar

By Bruce Bower

Chaser isn’t just a 9-year-old border collie with
her breed’s boundless energy, intense focus and
love of herding virtually anything. She’s a grammar hound.

In experiments directed by her owner,
psychologist John Pilley of Wofford College in
Spartanburg, S.C., Chaser demonstrated her grasp
of the basic elements of grammar by responding
correctly to commands such as “to ball take
Frisbee” and its reverse, “to Frisbee take ball.”
The dog had previous, extensive training to
recognize classes of words including nouns, verbs and prepositions.

“Chaser intuitively discovered how to comprehend
sentences based on lots of background learning
about different types of words,” Pilley says. He
reports the results May 13 in Learning and Motivation.

Throughout the first three years of Chaser’s
life, Pilley and a colleague trained the dog to
recognize and fetch more than 1,000 objects by
name. Using praise and play as reinforcements,
the researchers also taught Chaser the meaning of
different types of words, such as verbs and
prepositions. As a result, Chaser learned that
phrases such as “to Frisbee” meant that she
should take whatever was in her mouth to the named object.

Exactly how the dog gained her command of grammar
is unclear, however. Pilley suspects that Chaser
first mentally linked each of two nouns she heard
in a sentence to objects in her memory. Then the
canine held that information in mind while
deciding which of two objects to bring to which of two other objects.

Pilley’s work follows controversial studies of
grammar understanding in dolphins and a pygmy chimp.

© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013
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http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/mothers-diets-may-harm-iqs-in-twothirds-of-babies-8626229.html

Mothers' diets may harm IQs in two-thirds of babies

Jeremy Laurance

Iodine deficiency is widespread amongst pregnant
women in the UK and may be harming the cognitive
development of their children, scientists have found.

The first large study of the problem in the UK
has revealed that two-thirds of expectant mothers
had a mild to moderate deficiency in the mineral,
which was associated with significantly lower IQ
and reading ability in their children at the ages of eight and nine.

Iodine is essential for growth and development of
the brain, and pregnant women need 50 per cent
more. Researchers said women should ensure they
are getting enough from their diet – milk, yogurt
and fish are the best sources – and that any
pregnancy supplement they take contains iodine.

But they warned that kelp and seaweed supplements
should be avoided as they contain variable levels
of iodine and could lead to overdose. Severe
iodine deficiency is known to cause brain damage
and is the biggest cause of mental deficiency in
the developing world. But mild to moderate iodine
deficiency has been little studied – until now.

Researchers from the Universities of Surrey and
Bristol examined records of 1,000 mothers who
were part of the Children of the 90s study which
has followed the development of children born to
14,000 mothers in Avon since 1990-91. They found
that 67 per cent of the mothers had levels of
iodine below that recommended by the World Health
Organisation. Their children were divided into
groups according to how well they performed on IQ
and reading tests at eight and nine. The results
showed those whose mothers had low iodine levels
were 60 per cent more likely to be in the bottom group.

© independent.co.uk
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http://healthland.time.com/2013/05/20/10000-hours-may-not-make-a-master-after-all/

10,000 Hours May Not Make a Master After All

By Maia Szalavitz

There are many roads to greatness, but logging
10,000 hours of practice to help you perfect a skill may not be sufficient.

Based on research suggesting that practice is the
essence of genius, best-selling author Malcolm
Gladwell popularized the idea that 10,000 hours
of appropriately guided practice was “the magic
number of greatness,” regardless of a person’s
natural aptitude. With enough practice, he
claimed in his book Outliers, anyone could
achieve a level of proficiency that would rival
that of a professional. It was just a matter of putting in the time.

But in the years since Gladwell first pushed the
“10,000-hours rule,” researchers have engaged in
a spirited debate over what that rule entails.
It’s clear that not just any practice, but only
dedicated and intensive honing of skills that
counts. And is there magic in that 10,000th hour?

In an attempt to answer some of these questions,
and to delve further into how practice leads to
mastery, Zach Hambrick, associate professor of
psychology at Michigan State University, and his
colleagues decided to study musicians and chess
players. It helps that both skills are amenable
to such analysis because players can be ranked
almost objectively. So in their research, which
was published in the journal Intelligence, they
reanalyzed data from 14 studies of top chess
players and musicians. They found that for
musicians, only 30% of the variance in their
rankings as performers could be accounted for by
how much time they spent practicing. For chess
players, practice only accounted for 34% of what
determined the rank of a master player.

© 2013 Time Inc. All rights reserved
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