母亲不聪明孩子一定笨 研究:爱走神的孩子更聪明

研究:爱走神的孩子更聪明  

Children whose minds wander might have sharper brains
research suggests.
A study has found that people who appear to be constantly distracted have more “working memory”， giving them the ability to hold a lot of information in their heads and manipulate it mentally.
Children at school need this type of memory on a daily basis for a variety of tasks
such as following teachers’ instructions or remembering dictated sentences.
学校中的孩子每日需要这类记忆来完成各种任务，例如遵从老师的教导，或记住听写的句子。
During the study
volunteers were asked to perform one of o simple tasks during which researchers checked to ask if the participants’ minds were wandering.
At the end
participants measured their working memory capacity by their ability to remember a series of letters interspersed with simple maths questions.
Daniel Levinson
a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States
said that those with higher working memory capacity reported “more mind wandering during these simple tasks”， but their performance did not suffer.
The results
published online in the journal Psychological Science
appear to confirm previous research that found working memory allows humans to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously.
Dr Jonathan Smallwood
of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig
Germany
said: “What this study seems to suggest is that
when circumstances for the task aren’t very difficult
people who have additional working memory resources deploy them to think about things other than what they’re doing.”
Working memory capacity is also associated with general measures of intelligence
such as reading prehension and IQ scores
and also offers a window into the widespread
but not well understood
realm of internally driven thoughts.
Dr Smallwood added: “Our results suggest the sorts of planning that people do quite often in daily life — when they are on the bus
when they are cycling to work
when they are in the shower — are probably supported by working memory.
“Their brains are trying to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.”