Gummed-up memory: chewing gum impairs short-term recall

An empirical study of the use of Chewing Gum by Youth as a replacement to Cigarette addiction

The current study aimed to add to this of knowledge by examining the effect of chewing gum on smoking withdrawal severity over a long period, as well as identifying the specific characteristics of chewing gum that may be responsible for the reported reductions in withdrawal. Chewing, flavour, and the combination of the two were all investigated separately. The study is based on quantitative research. The data has been classified on basis of smoker and non-smoker. Participants reported a significant difference in withdrawal severity across conditions using repeated measures Chi square, F(3, 69)=2.89, p.05. The flavoured gum condition had considerably lower withdrawal scores than the flavourless gum base and no product control conditions, according to follow-up analyses. These data suggest that chewing gum is effective in reducing the severity of nicotine withdrawal symptoms over a 24-hour period of nicotine abstinence, and that the impact is due to a combination of flavour and chewing. These findings, together with findings from previous laboratory studies, show that chewing gum could be a useful coping mechanism for those who are trying to quit smoking. 

The influence of rhythm on short-term memory for serial order

In the field of verbal short-term memory (STM), numerous theoretical models have been proposed to explain how serial order information is processed and represented. Evidence suggests that serial order is represented through associations between items and a varying contextual signal coding the position of each item in a sequence, but the nature of this contextual signal is still a matter of debate (i.e., event-based vs. time-based varying signal). According to event-based models of serial order, the contextual signal coding serial order is not sensitive to temporal manipulations, as it is the case in irregularly timed sequences. Up to now, the study of the temporal factors influencing serial order STM has been limited to temporal grouping and temporal isolation effects. The goal of the present study is to specify in more detail the role played by temporal factors in serial order STM tasks. To accomplish this, we compared recall performance and error patterns for sequences presenting items at a regular or an irregular and unpredictable timing in three experiments. The results showed that irregular timing does not affect serial recall nor the pattern of errors. These data clearly favour the view that serial order in verbal STM is represented with event-based rather than time-based codes.

The effect of masticatory behaviour on generalized attention in heathy volunteers

AIM

As our society ages, the number of people living with dementia also steadily increases. Some work has focused on masticatory behaviour as a form of daily health care that could help prevent cognitive impairment and dementia. However, it is not yet clear how masticatory behaviour influences various cognitive functions. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the effect of masticatory behaviour on the decline of generalized attention, an important cognitive function.

METHODS

Participants were 35 healthy, dentulous individuals without stomatognathic abnormalities (24 men, 11 women; mean age: 56.8 ± 4.8 years). All participants completed three interventions: mastication, foot-stepping, and none (control). Pre- and post-intervention measures of generalized attention were measured by using neuropsychological tests to examine general attention; the results were then compared. Simultaneously, during the generalized attention task, the functional activity of the prefrontal cortex was observed on functional near-infrared spectroscopy.

RESULTS

Response time of generalized attention improved in both the masticatory and foot-stepping interventions. There was a transient increase in oxyhaemoglobin activity in the right and left prefrontal cortices in the masticatory intervention.

CONCLUSIONS

Masticatory behaviour may be involved in a partial improvement of generalized attention and may induce prefrontal cortex activity in middle-aged and older adults.

Vigilance Decrement and Enhancement Techniques: A Review

This paper presents the first comprehensive review on vigilance enhancement using both conventional and unconventional means, and further discusses the resulting contradictory findings. It highlights the key differences observed between the research findings and argues that variations of the experimental protocol could be a significant contributing factor towards such contradictory results. Furthermore, the paper reveals the effectiveness of unconventional means of enhancement in significant reduction of vigilance decrement compared to conventional means. Meanwhile, a discussion on the challenges of enhancement techniques is presented, with several suggested recommendations and alternative strategies to maintain an adequate level of vigilance for the task at hand. Additionally, this review provides evidence in support of the use of unconventional means of enhancement on vigilance studies, regardless of their practical challenges.

Does reduced mastication influence cognitive and systemic health during aging?

There is a growing body of literature which suggests that oral health and mastication can influence cognitive and systemic health during aging. However, it is currently unclear whether oral health, masticatory efficiency, cognitive health and systemic health merely deteriorate independently with age, or whether mechanisms exist linking mastication to cognitive and systemic health directly. The aim of this paper is to review the extent to which reduced mastication influences cognitive and systemic health during aging because this knowledge may underpin future interventions that improve quality of life. Current evidence suggests that a deterioration in mastication and oral health during aging can have: 1) direct effects on systemic health through mechanisms such as the migration of the oral microbiota into the systemic environment, and 2) indirect effects on systemic health through changes nutrient intake. A loss of teeth and reduction in masticatory efficiency during aging can have: 1) direct effects on cognitive performance and potentially impact cognitive health through mechanisms such as enhanced adult hippocampal neurogenesis, and 2) indirect effects on cognitive health through changes in nutrient intake. It is concluded that oral health and masticatory efficiency are modifiable factors which influence the risk poor cognitive and systemic health during aging, although it is currently premature to propose chewing-based interventions to slow the rate of cognitive decline and improve cognitive health during aging. Future research should include large-scale longitudinal studies which control for the types of confounding factors which concurrently influence the association between mastication and cognitive and systemic health.

Speak, Act, Remember

The fields of language production and verbal memory have relatively little contact. I argue that utterance planning for language production has substantial memory maintenance demands and that utterance planning provides the maintenance and ordering processes for short-term verbal memory tasks. There has already been some movement toward this view. I discuss benefits to pursuing these links more fully.

Rapid Communication: Want to block earworms from conscious awareness? B(u)y gum!

Three experiments examine the role of articulatory motor planning in experiencing an involuntary musical recollection (an “earworm”). Experiment 1 shows that interfering with articulatory motor programming by chewing gum reduces both the number of voluntary and the number of involuntary—unwanted—musical thoughts. This is consistent with other findings that chewing gum interferes with voluntary processes such as recollections from verbal memory, the interpretation of ambiguous auditory images, and the scanning of familiar melodies, but is not predicted by theories of thought suppression, which assume that suppression is made more difficult by concurrent tasks or cognitive loads. Experiment 2 shows that chewing the gum affects the experience of “hearing” the music and cannot be ascribed to a general effect on thinking about a tune only in abstract terms. Experiment 3 confirms that the reduction of musical recollections by chewing gum is not the consequence of a general attentional or dual-task demand. The data support a link between articulatory motor programming and the appearance in consciousness of both voluntary and unwanted musical recollections.

Chewing gum: cognitive performance, mood, well-being, and associated physiology

Recent evidence has indicated that chewing gum can enhance attention, as well as promoting well-being and work performance. Four studies (two experiments and two intervention studies) examined the robustness of and mechanisms for these effects. Study 1 investigated the acute effect of gum on mood in the absence of task performance. Study 2 examined the effect of rate and force of chewing on mood and attention performance. Study 3 assessed the effects of chewing gum during one working day on well-being and performance, as well as postwork mood and cognitive performance. In Study 4, performance and well-being were reported throughout the workday and at the end of the day, and heart rate and cortisol were measured. Under experimental conditions, gum was associated with higher alertness regardless of whether performance tasks were completed and altered sustained attention. Rate of chewing and subjective force of chewing did not alter mood but had some limited effects on attention. Chewing gum during the workday was associated with higher productivity and fewer cognitive problems, raised cortisol levels in the morning, and did not affect heart rate. The results emphasise that chewing gum can attenuate reductions in alertness, suggesting that chewing gum enhances worker performance.

Chewing gum moderates the vigilance decrement

We examine the impact of chewing gum on a Bakan-type vigilance task that requires the continual updating of short-term order memory. Forty participants completed a 30-min auditory Bakan-task either with, or without, the requirement to chew gum. Self-rated measures of mood were taken both pre- and post-task. As expected, the vigilance task produced a time-dependent performance decrement indexed via decreases in target detections and lengthened correct reaction times (RTs), and a reduction in post-task self-rated alertness scores. The declines in both performance and subjective alertness were attenuated in the chewing-gum group. In particular, correct RTs were significantly shorter following the chewing of gum in the latter stages of the task. Additionally, the gradients of decline for target detection and incline for correct RTs were both attenuated for the chewing-gum group. These findings are consistent with the data of Tucha and Simpson (2011), Appetite, 56, 299-301, who showed beneficial effects of chewing gum in the latter stages of a 30 min visual attention task, and extend their data to a task that necessitates the continuous updating of order memory. It is noteworthy that our data contradict the claim (Kozlov, Hughes, & Jones, 2012, Q. J. Exp. Psychology, 65, 501-513) that chewing gum negatively impacts short-term memory task performance.