University of Chicago scientists have identified a brain region that appears central to perceiving the combination of color and motion. These neurons shift in sensitivity toward different colors and directions depending on what is being attended. The study sheds light on a key neurological process.
Sometimes when people get upsetting news – such as a failing exam grade or a negative job review – they decide instantly to do better the next time. In other situations that are equally disappointing, the same people may feel inclined to just give up. How can similar setbacks produce such different reactions? It may come down to how much control we feel we have over what happened, according to new research from Rutgers University-Newark. The study, published in the journal Neuron, also finds that when these setbacks occur, the level of control we perceive may even determine which of two distinct parts of the brain will handle the crisis.
Why do cocaine addicts relapse after months or years of abstinence? The National Institute on Drug Abuse has awarded a University at Buffalo scientist a $2 million grant to conduct research that will provide some answers.
Administering synthetic marijuana (cannabinoids) soon after a traumatic event can prevent PTSD-like (post-traumatic stress disorder) symptoms in rats, caused by the trauma and by trauma reminders
Sleep difficulties may be linked to faster rates of decline in brain volume, according to a study published in the September 3, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Prescribing both a stimulant and an antipsychotic drug to children with physical aggression and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), along with teaching parents to use behavior management techniques, reduces aggressive and serious behavioral problems in children, according to a study conducted by researchers in the Department of Psychiatry at Stony Brook University School of Medicine. The findings are published in the September issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
By manipulating neural circuits in the brain of mice, scientists have altered the emotional associations of specific memories. The research, led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Susumu Tonegawa at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), reveals that the connections between the part of the brain that stores contextual information about an experience and the part of the brain that stores the emotional memory of that experience are malleable.
Exercising to improve our cardiovascular strength may protect us from cognitive impairment as we age, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Montreal and its affiliated Institut universitaire de gératrie de Montréal Research Centre.
Most people know children learn many skills simply by watching people around them. Without explicit instructions youngsters know to do things like press a button to operate the television and twist a knob to open a door. Now researchers have taken this further, finding that children as young as age 2 intuitively use mathematical concepts such as probability to help make sense of the world around them.
Where you live doesn’t have to determine your school success, according to a recent study by Dr. Tracy Alloway, UNF assistant professor of psychology. Instead, your working memory—your ability to remember and process information—is a much better predictor of learning outcomes.
Strongly influenced by their self-interest, humans do not protest being overcompensated, even when there are no consequences, researchers in Georgia State University’s Brains and Behavior Program have found.
According to researchers at the University of Montreal, the regions of the brain below the cortex play an important role as we train our bodies’ movements and, critically, they interact more effectively after a night of sleep. While researchers knew that sleep helped us the learn sequences of movements (motor learning), it was not known why.
Spontaneous gesture can help children learn, whether they use a spoken language or sign language, according to a new report.
Pressure to meet national education standards may be the reason states with significant populations of African-American students and those with larger class sizes often require children to learn fewer skills, finds a University of Kansas researcher.
Using a deceptively simple set of experiments, researchers at Johns Hopkins have learned why people learn an identical or similar task faster the second, third and subsequent time around. The reason: They are aided not only by memories of how to perform the task, but also by memories of the errors made the first time.
Men, women and children exposed to high levels of phthalates - endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in plastics and some personal care products – tended to have reduced levels of testosterone in their blood compared to those with lower chemical exposure, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).
Findings from exploratory study suggest IB Middle Years Programme has a positive impact on students’ social-emotional well-being.
Violent behavior and beliefs among middle school students can be reduced through the implementation of a targeted violence intervention program, according to a Vanderbilt study released in the Journal of Injury and Violence Research.
Mount Holyoke College's The Lynk is a comprehensive program that connects liberal arts courses with students’ career goals. The program isn’t just an add-on for seniors, but offers an integrated series of trainings and opportunities to build skills throughout a student’s four years.
In the past 10 years an active-learning course, called “Active Physics,” has gradually displaced lecture-based introductory courses in physics at Washington University in St. Louis. But are active-learning techniques effective when they are scaled up to large classes? A comprehensive three-year evaluation suggests that “Active Physics” consistently produces more proficient and confident students than the lecture courses it is replacing.
Researchers at the University of Montreal and CHU Sainte-Justine Research Centre have traced the origins of ADHD, substance abuse and conduct disorder, and found that they develop from the same neurocognitive deficits, which in turn explains why they often occur together.
Scientists at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences have created the Human Dynamic Clamp to address the difficult problem of studying social interactions in the laboratory. Their findings were released today in an article titled “The Human Dynamic Clamp as a Paradigm for Social Interaction” in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
What is the best way to keep psychology students from switching majors? According to a study published in the journal Teaching of Psychology, putting off intensive science courses may help. The study was conducted by Jeffrey Holmes, associate professor of psychology at Ithaca College, and is available at top.sagepub.com/content/41/2/104.
A large new genetic study in thousands of children and adolescents offers early glimpses of the overall patterns and connections among cognitive abilities such as language reasoning, reading skill and types of memory. The findings may lead to new tools in understanding human cognitive development and neuropsychiatric disorders.
People learn better and recall more when given the impression that they will soon have to teach newly acquired material to someone else, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.
Nearly 40 percent of women who earn engineering degrees quit the profession or never enter the field, and for those who leave, poor workplace climates and mistreatment by managers and co-workers are common reasons, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association’s 122nd Annual Convention.
Learning to play a musical instrument or to sing can help disadvantaged children strengthen their reading and language skills, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association’s 122nd Annual Convention.
Parents play a direct role in distracted teen driving, with more than half of teens talking on cellphones with their mother or father while driving, according to new research presented at the American Psychological Association’s 122nd Annual Convention.
In the first study of its kind, Prapti Gautam, PhD, and colleagues from The Saban Research Institute of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles found that children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) showed weaker brain activation during specific cognitive tasks than their unaffected counterparts.
Researchers at UC San Francisco have found that children with sensory processing disorders have decreased structural brain connections in specific sensory regions different than those in autism, further establishing SPD as a clinically important neurodevelopmental disorder.
ScratchJr, a free iPad app, is being released this week by researchers at the MIT Media Lab, Tufts University, and Playful Invention Company (PICO). With ScratchJr (scratchjr.org), children ages five to seven can program their own interactive stories and games. In the process, they learn how to create and express themselves with the computer, not just interact with it.
Babies can learn what to fear in the first days of life just by smelling the odor of their distressed mothers’, new research suggests. And not just “natural” fears: If a mother experienced something before pregnancy that made her fear something specific, her baby will quickly learn to fear it too -- through her odor when she feels fear.
Salk scientists show that the little-known supportive cells are vital in cognitive function.
A study involving nearly 27,000 older adults on five continents found that nearly 1 in 10 met criteria for pre-dementia based on a simple test that measures how fast people walk and whether they have cognitive complaints. People who tested positive for pre-dementia were twice as likely as others to develop dementia within 12 years. The study, led by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Montefiore Medical Center, was published online on July 16, 2014 in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Friends play an extremely important role in a person’s life. From infancy on, we have a desire to connect and those early relationships help to mold and develop our adult character. Through interactions with one another, we learn to think beyond ourselves to understand the needs and desires of others.
Leaving the television on can be detrimental to children's learning and development, according to a new study from the University of Iowa. Researchers found that background television can divert a child’s attention from play and learning. Results appear in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.
A study of 473 sets of twins followed since birth found twins have twice the rate of language delay as do single-born children. Moreover, identical twins have greater rates of language delay than do non-identical twins, strengthening the case for the heritability of language.
By carefully watching nearly a hundred hours of video showing mother rats protecting, warming, and feeding their young pups, and then matching up what they saw to real-time electrical readings from the pups’ brains, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center have found that the mother’s presence and social interactions — her nurturing role — directly molds the early neural activity and growth of her offsprings’ brain.
University of Washington research in 7- and 11-month-old infants shows that speech sounds stimulate areas of the brain that coordinate and plan motor movements for speech. The study suggests that baby brains start laying down the groundwork of how to form words long before they actually begin to speak.
A chimpanzee’s intelligence is largely determined by its genes, while environmental factors may be less important than scientists previously thought, according to a Georgia State University research study.
Although feelings are personal and subjective, the human brain turns them into a standard code that objectively represents emotions across different senses, situations and even people, reports a new study by Cornell University neuroscientist Adam Anderson.
People are focused on the external world and don’t enjoy spending much time alone thinking, according to a new study led by University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson and published in the journal Science.
Figuring out how to survive on a lean-season diet of hard-to-reach ants, slugs and other bugs may have spurred the development of bigger brains and higher-level cognitive functions in the ancestors of humans and other primates, suggests research from Washington University in St. Louis.
Humans have a well-documented tendency to see winning and losing streaks in situations that, in fact, are random. But scientists disagree about whether the “hot-hand bias” is a cultural artifact picked up in childhood or a predisposition deeply ingrained in the structure of our cognitive architecture.
Developmental psychologist Daphne Maurer has spent more than four decades studying the complexities of the human mind. As the director of the Visual Development Lab at McMaster University and president of the International Society on Infant Studies, Maurer will present her life’s work at the Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies in Berlin July 4th.
While preferring silence to music from the West, chimpanzees apparently like to listen to the different rhythms of music from Africa and India, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
Guidelines released today by Canadian pediatric emergency medicine researchers are in line with the work that has been taking place over the past several years at CHOP to help improve pediatric concussion diagnosis and treatment and standardize youth concussion care.
Researchers have shown that moving with others in time to music increases altruistic behavior in babies who have barely learned to walk.
Women who develop diabetes during pregnancy, called gestational diabetes, perform worse on cognitive function tests than do women with a normal pregnancy, according to a new study from Turkey. The results were presented Sunday at the joint meeting of the International Society of Endocrinology and the Endocrine Society: ICE/ENDO 2014 in Chicago.
Young adult men who watched more violence on television showed indications of less mature brain development and poorer executive functioning, according to the results of an Indiana University School of Medicine study published online in the journal Brain and Cognition.
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