2) Yerkes-Dodson: Lore, not Law by Cindy Nebel and Stress and Memory by Althea Need Kaminske
This pair of posts is one of my favorites. We were taught that Yerkes-Dodson Law was, well, a law. When stress is too low or too high, performance suffers. Then Cindy discovered, not necessarily so. Friends, we were all blown away, and I think that comes across clearly in the way these posts are written!
Althea writes, “Recently, Cindy talked about how the Yerkes-Dodson Law (or performance-arousal) is less of a law and more of a nice story about how stress influences performance…This is a lot to take in. Reader, I was shocked. I was shook. I have taught this “law” as part of my classes for the last decade. I was also more than a little embarrassed and slightly horrified that I had passed on bad information to my students without question. But, one of the joys of science is being wrong! If something is important enough for me to examine and think critically about, then I have to be open to being wrong about it. As uncomfortable as it is to find out you were wrong, I ultimately believe that it’s better to care enough to find out, than to not. (The ability to be ok with being wrong is, as it turns out, an important component of critical thinking (2)). And, ultimately, this led to a series of other questions for me to investigate. One of which was “Well, then how does stress affect memory?”
