Research Hit: The Bilingual Brain Is Better At Keeping On Task

By ignoring irrelevant information the bilingual brain can keep on task better

So another one showing the benefits of bilingual brains. So do you bilinguals feel superior?

Now, now! No, and according to this study I don’t even fall into the category of bilingual. For this study, bilingual was being brought up with two languages and still speaking them. I wasn’t really brought up with German (or only a little). But do speak German fluently - albeit with an English accent!

The researchers are also quick to point out that they are not trying to prove that “bilingual brains are better”. While saying that bilingual brains have better functional abilities in some areas…

So I thought one advantage was that the bilingual brain could switch tasks better?

Yes, that has been widely reported but in this research by Grace deMeurisse and Edith Kaan of the University of Florida they take this a step further to understand this. Is it task switching that is better, is it active focus, is it suppression, or something else?

For this they used something called the Partial Repetition Cost paradigm

The what?