1-2pm Pacific<\/strong>
Register to attend on Zoom at https:\/\/bit.ly\/DIBSseminar<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/files\/2026\/04\/UBC-DIBS-BI-Seminar-2026-05-Kaur-v2-1-1024x576.png\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nCognitive Endurance as Human Capital<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nSupreet Kaur<\/strong>
University of California, Berkeley<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nThis talk introduces “cognitive endurance”\u2014the ability to sustain effortful thinking over time\u2014as an underappreciated form of human capital that schooling can build. As motivation, we document that globally and in the US, lower-income individuals exhibit cognitive fatigue more quickly than the richer ones across a variety of field settings; they also attend schools that offer fewer opportunities to practice thinking for continuous stretches. Using a field experiment with 1,600 Indian primary school students, we show that simply giving kids more time to practice sustained thinking (even via games with no academic content) reduces cognitive fatigue by 21% and raises grades by nearly 0.1 standard deviations\u2014providing evidence of far transfer in high stakes outcomes. The findings suggest that schooling disparities may further disadvantage low-income children by hampering the development of a core mental capacity\u2014pointing to a concrete, low-cost lever for intervention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The UBC-DIBS<\/a> Behavioural Insights Seminar series features researchers and practitioners sharing their field and lab projects using the behavioural and decision sciences to “nudge for good”. Recordings of past seminars are available on the BI wiki here<\/a>. To subscribe or unsubscribe, email dibs@sauder.ubc.ca<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Supreet Kaur (Berkeley) will share her work exploring the importance of cognitive endurance and how we can improve it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28042,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"templates\/template-full-width.php","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,13,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-ubc","category-events","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6510"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6833,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510\/revisions\/6833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
University of California, Berkeley<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
This talk introduces “cognitive endurance”\u2014the ability to sustain effortful thinking over time\u2014as an underappreciated form of human capital that schooling can build. As motivation, we document that globally and in the US, lower-income individuals exhibit cognitive fatigue more quickly than the richer ones across a variety of field settings; they also attend schools that offer fewer opportunities to practice thinking for continuous stretches. Using a field experiment with 1,600 Indian primary school students, we show that simply giving kids more time to practice sustained thinking (even via games with no academic content) reduces cognitive fatigue by 21% and raises grades by nearly 0.1 standard deviations\u2014providing evidence of far transfer in high stakes outcomes. The findings suggest that schooling disparities may further disadvantage low-income children by hampering the development of a core mental capacity\u2014pointing to a concrete, low-cost lever for intervention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The UBC-DIBS<\/a> Behavioural Insights Seminar series features researchers and practitioners sharing their field and lab projects using the behavioural and decision sciences to “nudge for good”. Recordings of past seminars are available on the BI wiki here<\/a>. To subscribe or unsubscribe, email dibs@sauder.ubc.ca<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Supreet Kaur (Berkeley) will share her work exploring the importance of cognitive endurance and how we can improve it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28042,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"templates\/template-full-width.php","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,13,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-ubc","category-events","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6510"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6833,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510\/revisions\/6833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/biwiki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}