Ruth Day “Language-Based Cognitive Control?”
I was happy to make it to Ruth Day’s talk (C&CN lunchbox series) on time after a microcrisis generated by my water bottle exploding in my backpack severely damaging my iphone and my external harddrive.
Associate Professor Ruth S. Day has spent many years demystifying cognitive processes and everyday cognition . She’s one of those scientists who knows her subject so well that she can make her research highly accessible and her data “enjoyable”. (Her talk compared to other science lectures I’ve attended was exceptionally fun)
She started off by discriminating btw “language-based” people and “language-optional” people. These two groups perform in characteristically different ways on many cognitive tasks including short-term memory, long-term memory, foreign-language skills, and music skills.
Here’s an excerpt from her lab website:
“Individuals differ in many ways. Many investigators study how individuals differ based on distinctions such as age, gender, “intelligence,” and education level. Our research takes a different approach - it studies whether individuals differ in their overall cognitive pattern”
Two things that stuck to my mind from her talk:
1.Right ear captures words better than the left ear
2.language-optional people perform better at mimicking foreign languages or adopting to new phonetic rules.
oh and testing is important (medical labelling )
