The effects of activating a “baby brain” stereotype on pregnant women’s cognitive functioning

Poorer decision making among college students during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence for "pandemic-brain"

OBJECTIVE

Did living through the COVID-19 pandemic cause healthy college students to experience "pandemic-brain," a phenomenon characterized by difficulties with various cognitive abilities? Did students shift from deliberative to more impulsive decision making?

PARTICIPANTS

We compared a pre-pandemic sample of 722 undergraduate students to 161 undergraduate students recruited in Fall 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

METHOD

We compared scores on the Adult Decision Making Competence scale among participants who completed the task pre-pandemic or across two time points in Fall 2020, during the pandemic.

RESULTS

Decision making was less consistent and more reliant on gain/loss framing during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic, but college students were no less confident in their decisions. No significant changes in decision making occurred during the pandemic.

CONCLUSIONS

These decision making changes could increase the risk of making an impulsive choice with negative health consequences affecting demands on student health centers and imperiling learning environments.

Matrescence: lifetime impact of motherhood on cognition and the brain

Profound environmental, hormonal, and neurobiological changes mark the transition to motherhood as a major biosocial life event. Despite the ubiquity of motherhood, the enduring impact of caregiving on cognition and the brain across the lifespan is not well characterized and represents a unique window of opportunity to investigate human neural and cognitive development. By integrating insights from the human and animal maternal brain literatures with theories of cognitive ageing, we outline a framework for understanding maternal neural and cognitive changes across the lifespan. We suggest that the increased cognitive load of motherhood provides an initial challenge during the peripartum period, requiring continuous adaptation; yet when these demands are sustained across the lifespan, they result in increased late-life cognitive reserve.

Blame it on her 'baby brain'? Investigating the contents of social stereotypes about pregnant women's warmth and competence

The Stereotype Content Model proposes that social stereotypes broadly exist along two dimensions: warmth and competence. This framework has been used to investigate the contents of stereotypes of gendered groups in a range of contexts. However, it has not been extensively applied to perceptions of pregnant women. This is important, given how pregnant women are typically framed by society to have 'baby brain' or reduced competence. Therefore, we investigated the contents of social stereotypes of pregnant women. In Study 1, participants (N = 590) rated a target group (pregnant women) and thirteen other comparison groups on perceptions of warmth (compassion, empathy and comfort) and competence (mathematics ability, logic and memory). Pregnant women were generally stereotyped to have low competence and high warmth, relative to other groups. Study 2 (N = 54) then descriptively investigated the wider contents of stereotypes related to pregnant women, new mothers, men and women using a trait generation task. Generated traits were coded within the dimensions of warmth and competence. This showed, again, that pregnant women were assigned traits related to warmth and poor competence. Taken together, these studies confirmed that perceptions of low competence and 'baby brain' in pregnancy is broadly held by a non-pregnant sample.