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"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt.

Awkward Moments

Awkward moments are moments in which people feel uncomfortable and usually wish to remove themselves from a place or situation. People may find awkward moments humorous, and may even seek out awkward moments, as seen in pop culture such as Arrested Development (TV series) . Furthermore, awkward moments have become a common point of conversation in today's society, with moments sometimes even referred to as awk. These moments, although frequently humorous, can be detrimental in professional settings, and can even be associated with mental disorders, such as anthropophobia.

References

The Mooney Face Test was developed by Craig Mooney and his results published in 1957 as “Age in the development of closure ability in children.” In the test, participants are shown low-information two-tone pictures of faces, and are asked to identify features and distinguish between real and "false" faces. It is a test of a concept he called "perceptual closure": the ability to form coherent mental pictures with very little visual information. In a study conducted with 370 participants, an association between performance on the Mooney Face Test and a polymorphism on the RAPGEF5 gene was identified.

References

• The selectivity of the occipitotemporal M170 for faces
• Neural responses to Mooney images reveal a modular representation of faces in human visual cortex
• Neuroelectromagnetic correlates of perceptual closure processes

Category:Cognitive tests

Effectiveness

There is no scientific consensus on the benefits of brain training for medical conditions in the clinical environment. Studies of Lumosity's effectiveness have shown mixed results.

Some have shown benefits from the use of Lumos Labs cognitive training:

• Dr. Shelli Kesler and colleagues at Stanford University found improved cognitive performance and corresponding increases in brain activity in the pre-frontal cortex in survivors of childhood cancer following training with Lumosity. Participants who trained with Lumosity showed significantly improved processing speed, cognitive flexibility, verbal and visual declarative memory scores.
• Kesler et al. demonstrated enhanced math skills and cognitive performance with corresponding changes in brain activity in individuals with Turner syndrome following training with Lumosity.
• Kesler et al. found that women whose breast cancer had been treated with chemotherapy demonstrated improved executive function, such as cognitive flexibility, verbal fluency and processing speed after Lumosity training. This work is published in Clinical Breast Cancer.
• Psychologist Maurice Finn and Skye McDonald from the University of New South Wales found that patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) who trained with Lumosity improved their sustained attention relative to controls. MCI is considered a precursor condition to Alzheimer’s disease, and this is the first report of cognitive enhancement with training in this population.
• Mayas and Colleagues found a significant reduction of distraction and an increase of alertness in eldery healthy adults after 20 one-hour training sessions using Lumosity in comparison to a control group. The authors conclude that these results suggest neurocognitive plasticity in the old human brain.

However, other studies that did not use Lumosity had mixed results. "[T]here is no scientific evidence to support a range of manufacturers' claims [including Lumosity's] that the gadgets can help improve memory or stave off the risk of illnesses such as dementia." A careful attempt to replicate the preliminary experimental results on which this enterprise is based found no effect from the training. Some have noted that the clinical trials cited on their website show that studies conducted used a very small sample size and that the methodology section fails to clearly explain how control groups were handled. Other studies have failed to demonstrate generalizable benefits of brain training. In other words, improvements shown in one field of cognitive ability has not been found to be transferrable. (This is seen most commonly in successful improvement in working memory skills, and the inability to generalize to other skills such as verbal and nonverbal ability, attention, etc.)

Meanwhile, studies have only been able to show mild changes to cognitive abilities, and no studies have shown significant findings. It is unclear whether or not the improvements are at all caused by the brain trainings, or are simply a result of the training effect -- one gets better at something with more experience. The changes that are observed are also short-lived, and it has been recommended that future studies look at the possible longevity that can be maintained from these brain trainings. This somewhat invalidates the company's claim to improve neurological plasticity, in that the only reliable improvements observed have only been short-term, while the mechanism of plasticity itself is to permanently alter the brain's neuronal transmission processes. This short-term effect can't completely disregard the possibility for long-term effects, for the studies themselves were only conducted for a specific amount of time. These cognitive improvements may find to be long-lasting with research done in longitudinal studies.