Word: mcgivern
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...also points to an intriguing 2002 study by San Diego State psychologist Robert McGivern that showed that certain cognitive processes become temporarily less efficient at puberty. McGivern and his associates timed 300 subjects, ages 10 to 22, as they did a very simple set of matching tasks involving pictures of facial expressions and words describing them (happy, angry, sad). The study found that around the onset of puberty (about age 11 for girls and 12 for boys), people take significantly longer to do this easy task. McGivern and his associates attributed the slow pace to the excess number of synapses...
...interview, McGivern said he thought an apparent drop-off in the ability to learn new things at puberty might merely reflect the fact that teenagers are becoming more attuned to social issues than dull learning tasks: "It may be a shift in what we pay attention to and are motivated to look at that's driving this." But that would not explain Smith's mice or similar biochemical changes she has observed in tissue samples related to learning. (There's no question of motivation in a petri dish...