Feature Channels: Cognition and Learning

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Preterm babies perform as well as their full-term counterparts in a developmental task linking language and cognition, a new study from Northwestern University has found.The study, the first of its kind with preterm infants, tests the relative contributions of infants’ experience and maturational status. Northwestern researchers compared healthy preterm and full-term infants at the same maturational age, or age since conception.

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A new study from the University of Iowa found that teenagers who participated in volunteer activities on their own had 11 percent fewer illegal behaviors between the ages of 18 and 28 than teenagers who did not volunteer. They also had 31 percent fewer arrests and 39 percent fewer convictions.

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The study conducted in the Texas Tech University College of Media & Communication shows an increased physiological change in children when parents view programs with them as opposed to being in a separate room.

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A new study led by University of North Carolina School of Medicine researchers concluded that patterns of white matter microstructure present at birth and that develop after birth predict the cognitive function of children at ages 1 and 2.

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New research from the Monell Center reveals that children begin using olfactory information to help guide their responses to emotionally-expressive faces at about age five. The findings advance understanding of how children integrate different types of sensory information to direct their social behavior.

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Investigators in veterinary and human medicine have uncovered long-term changes in the brains of adult female rats exposed to social stresses early in life, with the biggest impact on regions of the brain linked to social behavior, stress, emotion and depression. The findings will enable researchers to begin testing preventative measures and treatments for depression and anxiety.

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Research Fellow Monamie RINGHOFER and Associate Professor Shinya YAMAMOTO (Kobe University Graduate School of Intercultural Studies) have proved that when horses face unsolvable problems they use visual and tactile signals to get human attention and ask for help. The study also suggests that horses alter their communicative behavior based on humans' knowledge of the situation. These findings were published in the online version of Animal Cognition on November 24.

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Findings help advance understanding of social cognition and social development

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A new study has found that the type of psychotherapy used to treat the gastrointestinal disorder irritable bowel syndrome makes a difference in improving patients' daily functioning.

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The Cognitive and Immersive Systems Laboratory (CISL) has developed a prototype of its cognitive and immersive environment for collaborative problem-solving.

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The naming of colors has long been a topic of interest in the study of human culture and cognition — revealing the link between perception, language, and the categorization of the natural world. A major question in the study of both anthropology and cognitive science is why the world’s languages show recurrent similarities in color naming. Linguists at Yale tracked the evolution of color terms across a large language tree in Australia in order to trace the history of these systems.

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Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered for the first time that the rhythm of breathing creates electrical activity in the human brain that enhances emotional judgments and memory recall. These effects on behavior depend critically on whether you inhale or exhale and whether you breathe through the nose or mouth.

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Indiana University psychologists have shown that a baby's most likely first words are based upon their visual experience, laying the foundation for a new theory of infant language learning. The study appears in the journal of the Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B.

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Even if they don’t understand the words, infants react to the way their mother speaks and the emotions conveyed through speech. What exactly they react to and how has yet to be fully deciphered, but could have significant impact on a child’s development. Researchers in acoustics and psychology teamed up to better define and study this impact.

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Open office plans are becoming increasingly common in the workplace -- offering a way to optimize available space and encourage dialogue, interaction and collaboration among employees. However, a new study suggests that productive work-related conversations might actually decrease the performance of other employees within earshot -- more so than other random, meaningless noises.

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Slight gender variations in attention scores have been well documented, but a new study from Harvard Medical School suggests that these minor gaps widen significantly in places with lower gender equality. The findings, published Nov. 1 in PLOS One, reveal that gender variations in performance of tasks that require participants to exercise sustained attention control are closely tied to gender equality by country.

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Researchers at Stockholm University and Brooklyn College have combined knowledge from the fields of artificial intelligence, ethology and the psychology of learning to solve several problems concerning the behaviour and intelligence of animals.

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This study shows that when patients with PD experience a drop in blood pressure upon standing up – a condition known as orthostatic hypotension (OH) – they exhibit significant cognitive deficits. These deficits reverse when the individual lies down and their blood pressure returns to normal. As a result, these findings are important as clinical providers might miss an important target for intervention when not considering OH as a contributor to cognitive impairment.

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NIBIB-funded researchers have used fast fMR Ito image rapidly fluctuating brain activity during human thought. fMRI measures changes in blood oxygenation, which were previously thought to be too slow to detect the subtle neuronal activity associated with higher order brain functions. The new discovery is a significant step towards realizing a central goal of neuroscience research: mapping the brain networks responsible for human cognitive functions such as perception, attention, and awareness.

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Results from a new study show that online group therapy can be just as effective as face-to-face treatment, although the pace of recovery may be slower.