Dr. Daniel Bernstein is an instructor in the Psychology department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University located in British Columbia, Canada. Kwantlen has four campuses spread across the Lower Mainland, including Surrey, Richmond, Cloverdale, and Langley. Dr. Bernstein is most often found at the Surrey campus. Dr. Bernstein also holds adjunct and affiliate positions in the Psychology departments at the University of Washington and Simon Fraser University. As a cognitive psychologist, Dr. Bernstein’s work focuses on memory and decision making, most notably false memory, fluency, the revelation effect, hindsight bias, Theory of Mind, perspective taking, and lifespan cognitive development. Click here for Dr. Bernstein’s CV. Danny is an old boss, long-time mentor, and the one who was the transition from an interest in individual differences to writing and journalism. There are many people like that in my life. And I am eternally grateful to them. Here we talk about Lifespan Cognition and the Lifespan Cognition Lab.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: My first introduction to a psychology course was an Advanced Placement course at my high school. I immensely enjoyed the course, but I didn’t consider pursuing this as a possible course of study until later in early life for me. When I went to university, first, it didn’t seem like a reasonable possibility given family financial situation and coming from an alcoholic home. It was a bit of a precarious situation on all fronts. Yet, I recall, and knowing the fragility of human memory this should be taken with a pinch of salt, going down the second floor of one of the buildings in Kwantlen Polytechnic University Surrey campus. I accidentally wandered into the main office for the psychology labs, mostly Danny’s space. I was redirected by one of the lab members at the time, Louise, back down the end of the hall to the offices. This is where the memory is more cloudy. If it is accurate, I met Danny, briefly. That, eventually, began a period of mentorship over time and then attending KPU for a time.
To this day, Danny still answers random emails thrown his way. He’s been exceptionally generous with time and expertise, and support, for me, whether attendance at conferences, learning some of the basic ropes of psychological research, meeting Dr. Anthony Greenwald over dinner in my early 20s, or being able to connect with the famed Prof. Elizabeth Loftus at the University of California, Irvine who very generously gave time for two or three coffees when I was researching at or visiting UCIrvine over the last few years at the UCI Ethics Centre under Distinguished Professor Kristen Monroe (another exceptionally wonderful and brilliant person, which eventually earned a Tobis Fellow position for 2022/23 and a renewal for the 2023/24 year too, at UCIrvine). I do all this ass-kissing to begin a lab-based update on lifespan cognition research now, because I’m curious how the research, since I was in the lab, has been progressing. For those stumbling across this interview, Danny Bernstein is a former Tier 2 Canada Research Chair at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. The Lifespan Cognition Lab, which Danny directs, is located at the Surrey and Richmond campuses of KPU. Dr. Bernstein’s research is into “cognitive and developmental psychology to study perspective taking in everyone from preschoolers to senior citizens” through the Lifespan Cognition Lab.
So, as this is a lab-wide interview, individuals can answer specific inquiries. To those who want to take part in this interview, here’s one for everyone, what is your specific research question in research in the Lifespan Cognition Lab?
Carolyn Baer, Post-doctoral fellow: My research asks how we learn to reflect on what we are skilled at. This is a cognitive ability we call metacognition: the way our minds think about themselves. One project we’re working on right now is looking at how elementary school-aged children track what they are good at over time. We’re hoping that this can tell us more about how children learn about their unique strengths and weaknesses.
Jacobsen: What is the state of lifespan cognition research now, whether the big unanswered questions or the newest answers provided about the principles of memory and perspective taking across the lifespan?
Dr. Daniel M. Bernstein: The field of lifespan cognition is still in its relative infancy. People have been interested in lifespan cognition for a long time, but few researchers tackle the young child to older adult lifespan. That’s the age range I study, which presents unique experimental challenges. One challenge is designing tasks that are appropriate for all age groups. Even if one overcomes this challenge, one can never be sure that all age groups approach the same task in the same way. For example, the preschooler might not understand the task in the same way that older children and adults understand the task. The same problem applies to any given age group and any given task (e.g., some adults might approach a memory task in one way, while others approach it in an entirely different way). All things being equal, though, the variability in how people approach a given task is greater across age groups than within a given age group. So, lifespan cognition researchers must remain mindful of measurement error, and strive to minimize it.
As for the big unanswered questions, I am excited to see how the field tackles questions related to what is called theory of mind across the lifespan. Theory of mind refers to one’s understanding that minds differ from one’s own mind, and that people can hold mistaken or false beliefs about the world. There is a lot of work on this topic in children, and a growing body of work on infants and adults. However, few researchers are exploring theory of mind across the child to adult lifespan (see Bernstein, 2018; 2021). We know that people can have a mature theory of mind, but fail to use it properly in situations by acting egocentrically. Just because I know (or feel) something doesn’t mean that you also know (or feel) it. Future work on this question will help us answer how and why people, and possibly cultural groups, fail to use theory of mind in certain situations.
Jacobsen: Only to the principal investigator: With your research done in your career so far, what research finding has most surprised you – both in your own work and in the field as a whole?
Danny Bernstein, LCL Director: I’m both always surprised and at the same time not surprised by findings in cognitive psychology. The human brain is so complex that most of what we learn about our own thinking is bound to surprise us and then again, not surprise us. One of the most surprising findings of the past little while involves what psychologists call the “Replication Crisis.” The fact that many results don’t replicate doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is how Psychology has embraced this crisis and how it has worked hard to remedy the problem. We’ve done this in relatively short order, if you consider that Psychology as a whole became aware of a “Crisis” circa 2015 with the publication of “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science” (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). If you’ve read and studied Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” you might expect that Psychology would resist accepting the idea that it has a replication crisis. Some in the field certainly resisted at first, but not nearly as many as we might expect from other scientific revolutions. What is especially heartening to see is how Psychology’s handling of the replication crisis has influenced other fields, including biology and medicine. Indeed, it is nice to see Psychology blaze a trail for how science as a whole should handle failures to replicate.
As for my own work, I’ve been surprised by many findings from experiments that I and colleagues designed and conducted. One example is how the mere presence of a photograph related to a factual claim (that might be true or false) increases people’s belief in the claim’s truth. We called this effect truthiness, based on the comedian Stephen Colbert’s use of that term: truth that one feels in one’s gut rather than truth derived from books, logic, or factual evidence (Newman et al., 2012). For example, people tend to believe that giraffes cannot jump when they see a picture of a giraffe. The picture itself tells us nothing about the claim’s truth (this claim is false, by the way). We have extended this work to videos. In more recent work, people who watched a short video of someone landing a plane thought that they themselves could land a plane safely in an emergency. Although it is possible to land a plane safely in an emergency, it is highly unlikely for someone who has never flown a plane (Jordan et al., 2022). This effect extends to watching foreign shows with subtitles and then thinking that you can understand that foreign language (Jordan et al., 2024).
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Photo credit: Daniel Bernstein, Lifespan Cognition Lab.