The days are getting shorter, leaves are starting to fall, and a new season of the Great British Bake Off is upon us. We watched as this year’s contestants battled with batter, broke down over bread, crumbled before biscuits, and were torn by torte. One of the most difficult parts of the programme is the technical challenge. In order to succeed, the contestants have to create a perfect bake given the ingredients and basic instructions. The instructions can be extremely sparse. For example, the instructions for the batter week challenge just read ‘make laced pancakes’. This illustrates one of the fundamental challenges that face us in many situations in everyday life. We often have an abstract higher goal, a metaphorical laced pancake, and have to break it down into the necessary steps that get us to that goal, e.g. weight flour, sift flour, crack eggs and mix with flour etc.
The ability to plan is also important outside the Bake-off tent. Anyone who tried getting a four-year-old to bake will know that is also an ability that we are not born with but develop over time. Unfortunately, planning is not usually tested using baking challenges in developmental psych labs due to health & safety concerns among other reasons. Instead, clever games like the Tower of London task [1] are used (Shallice, 1982). In this test, the participant is presented with three pegs and a number of disks of varying sizes. The participant has to create a tower of disks according to a template by arranging the disks in the fewest moves possible while keeping all disks on the pegs and not placing a larger disk on top of a smaller one.
Figure: Illustration of the Tower of London task. Please contact us if you are interested in implementing this task using macarons and sponge fingers
Studies in typical development found that planning ability measured by this task develops continuously throughout childhood and adolescents until stable performance levels are reached in early adulthood (Huizinga, Dolan, & van der Molen, 2006; Luciana, Conklin, Hooper, & Yarger, 2005) – a possible reason for the absence of pre-schoolers in the GBB0 hall of fame. There is also an important lesson for teenage bakers: While general cognitive development contributes to performance improvements between childhood and adolescence, increased scores between late adolescence and adulthood are mostly due to better impulse control (Albert & Steinberg, 2011). So, in baking as in life, think how you will combat moisture before mixing the dough.
You may ask yourself if there are other factors beyond growing up and controlling impulses to get the edge in planning ability. Enthusiastic bakers with little concern about personal safety may find transcranial magnetic stimulation an appealing option. A 2012 study in the journal Experimental Brain Research found that magnetic stimulation of the right dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex significantly increased performance in the Tower of London task in patients with Parkinson’s disease (Srovnalova, Marecek, Kubikova, & Rektorova, 2012). However, the application to the field of fine baking remains to be investigated and the use of TMS in baking tents is not recommended.
Footnotes:
[1] This is a version of the classic Tower of Hanoi puzzle that has been adapted for neuropsychological testing)
References:
Albert, D., & Steinberg, L. (2011). Age Differences in Strategic Planning as Indexed by the Tower of London. Child Development, 82(5), 1501–1517. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01613.x
Huizinga, M., Dolan, C. V., & van der Molen, M. W. (2006). Age-related change in executive function: Developmental trends and a latent variable analysis. Neuropsychologia, 44(11), 2017–2036. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.01.010
Luciana, M., Conklin, H. M., Hooper, C. J., & Yarger, R. S. (2005). The Development of Nonverbal Working Memory and Executive Control Processes in Adolescents. Child Development, 76(3), 697–712. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2005.00872.x
Shallice, T. (1982). Specific Impairments of Planning. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 298(1089), 199–209. http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1982.0082
Srovnalova, H., Marecek, R., Kubikova, R., & Rektorova, I. (2012). The role of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the Tower of London task performance: repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation study in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Experimental Brain Research, 223(2), 251–257. http://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-012-3255-9
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