User:Ktrathen/sandbox

Article Evaluation: Mozart effect

 * This article does a good job of remaining neutral by describing supporting and not supporting evidence of the Mozart effect. Emphasis is placed on the fact that the research only shows an effect in spatial reasoning, but popular culture took this to indicate an increase in general intelligence, which is not supported by research.
 * There is one claim that might be taking a position too strongly: "The Mozart Effect is likely just an artifact of arousal and heightened mood." This claim has three citations, so there is evidence to support it, but it should be more clear that this statement is coming from these researchers.
 * Also, at the end of the article, "While it is clear that exposure to Mozart does not raise IQ..." While this may be true, it is too strong of a claim for this setting.
 * I believe both viewpoints (in favor of and against the existence of the Mozart effect) are about equally represented.
 * I saw several comments on the Talk page expressing the desire to restructure the article, and I think the article would benefit from some restructuring. Some sections are very short, and could be combined under a more general heading to make them longer.
 * One citation link did not work. (Steele, number 20)
 * Most of the citations are for journal articles, which are good sources. A few are newspaper articles, but the bias in these sources is discussed in the article itself, so it is acceptable.
 * All facts are cited, and when necessary the sources are evaluated in the article

Potential topic: thought suppression

 * I would want to add a section on the think-no-think paradigm, which is evidence that active suppression can lead to increased forgetting. The article mentions evidence that suppression does not lead to forgetting, so this would help to balance the article. (Anderson et al, Kupper et al)
 * Could also include retrieval-induced forgetting. (Cuc et al)
 * I would also check the citations that already exist for the article and make sure that they match with the in-text citations.
 * The article needs a clearer definition of thought suppression, and I would also want to add how it differs from repression in the introduction section and more concretely how it relates to inhibition.
 * Remove references to specific researchers in the body of the article.
 * Add info about the list methodology and the item methodology.

Other methodologies
Thought suppression has been shown to be a cause of inhibition, or forgetting, in several ways. Two commonly-used methods to study this relationship are the list method and the item method. In this list method, participants study two lists of words, one after the other. After studying the first list, some participants are told to forget everything that they have just learned, while others are not given this instruction. After studying both lists, participants are asked to recall the words on both lists. These experiments typically find that participants who were told to forget the first list do not remember as many words from that list, suggesting that they have been suppressed due to the instruction to forget. In the item method, participants study individual words rather than lists. After each word is shown, participants are told to either remember or forget the word. As in experiments using the list method, the words followed by the instruction to forget are more poorly remembered. Some researchers believe that these two methods result in different types of forgetting. According to these researchers, the list method results in inhibition of the forgotten words, but the item method results in some words being remembered better than the others, without a specific relation to forgetting.

A more recent paradigm to study how suppression relates to inhibition is the think/no think paradigm. In these experiments, participants study pairs of words. An example of a possible word pair is roach-ordeal. After all the word pairs are learned, the participants see the first word of the pair and are either told to think about the second word (think phase) or not to think about the second word (no think phase). The no think phase is when suppression occurs. Some pairs were never presented after the initial study portion of the study, and these trials serve as the control group. At the end of the experiment, the participants try to remember all of the word pairs based on the first word. Studies could also use the "independent probe" method, which gives the category and first letter of the second word of the pair. Typically, regardless of the method used, results show that the no-think trials result in worse memory than the think trials, which supports the idea that suppression leads to inhibition in memory. Although this methodology was first done using word pairs, experiments have been conducted using pictures and autobiographical memories as stimuli, with the same results.

Research has also shown that doing difficult counting tasks at the same time as a think/no think task leads to less forgetting in the no think condition, which suggests that suppression takes active mental energy to be successful. Furthermore, the most forgetting during the no think phase occurs when there is a medium amount of brain activation while learning the words. The words are never learned if there is too little activation, and the association between the two words is too strong to be suppressed during the no think phase if there is too much activation. However, with medium activation, the word pairs are learned but able to be suppressed during the no think phase.

fMRI studies have shown two distinct patterns of brain activity during suppression tasks. The first is that there is less activity in the hippocampus, the brain area responsible for forming memories. The second is an increase of brain activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, especially in cases where suppression is harder. Researchers think that this region works to prevent memory formation by preventing the hippocampus from working.

This methodology can also be used to study thought substitution by adding an instruction during the no think phase for participants to think of a different word rather than the word being suppressed. This research shows that thought substitution can lead to increased levels of forgetting compared to suppression without a thought substitution instruction. This research also suggests that thought substitution, while used as a suppression strategy during the no think phase, may work differently than suppression. Some researchers argue that thinking of something different during the no think phase forms a new association with the first word than the original word pair, which results in interference when using this strategy, which is different than the inhibition that results from simply not thinking about something.