Feature Channels: Cognition and Learning

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As Superman flies over the city, people on the ground famously suppose they see a bird, then a plane, and then finally realize it’s a superhero. But they haven’t just spotted the Man of Steel – they’ve experienced the ideal conditions to create a very strong memory of him.

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Increased longevity of those living with HIV means dealing with related health issues, including dementia and other cognition-related problems. An NIH grant supports development of interventions, treatments to improve everyday functioning, and quality of life.

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Watching television for more than a couple of hours a day is linked to lower school readiness skills in kindergartners, particularly among children from low-income families, finds a study by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and Université Sainte-Anne.

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For singers and their audiences, being “in tune” might not be as important as we think. The fact that singers fail to consistently hit the right notes may have implications for the development of musical scales as well.

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The Vanderbilt Smell and Taste Center kicked off in January with a monthly clinic designed to diagnose and begin treatment of smell and taste disorders. Rick Chandra, M.D., professor of Otolaryngology, said Vanderbilt has long treated these disorders as symptoms of other issues that bring patients here for treatment, and this clinic will focus on people with undiagnosed smell and taste issues.

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Cedars-Sinai neuroscientists have uncovered processes involved in how the human brain creates and maintains short-term memories. This study is the first clear demonstration of precisely how human brain cells work to create and recall short-term memories. Confirmation of this process and the specific brain regions involved is a critical step in developing meaningful treatments for memory disorders that affect millions of Americans.

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Experts on aviation and perception, Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde comment on the factors that can lead to pilot errors, such as the reported incident involving actor Harrison Ford landing his plane in close brush with a 737 at John Wayne Airport on Wednesday.

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Emotions are not innately programmed into our brains, but, in fact, are cognitive states resulting from the gathering of information, New York University Professor Joseph LeDoux and Richard Brown, a professor at the City University of New York, conclude.

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A research team led by Mathematician Tatsuya Sasaki from the University of Vienna presents a new optimal theory of the evolution of reputation-based cooperation. This team proves that the practice of making moral assessments conditionally is very effective in establishing cooperation in terms of evolutionary game theory. "Our study also demonstrates the evolutionary disadvantage of seeking reputation by sanctioning wrongdoers," says Sasaki. The results of the study were published on the in Scientific Reports.

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In the summer of 2015, a team at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School reported restoring rudimentary hearing in genetically deaf mice using gene therapy. Now the Boston Children’s research team reports restoring a much higher level of hearing — down to 25 decibels, the equivalent of a whisper — using an improved gene therapy vector developed at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. The new vector and the mouse studies are described in two back-to-back papers in Nature Biotechnology (published online February 6).

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Frequent soccer ball heading is a common and under recognized cause of concussion symptoms, according to a study of amateur players led by Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers. The findings run counter to earlier soccer studies suggesting concussion injuries mainly result from inadvertent head impacts, such as collisions with other players or a goalpost. The study was published online today in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

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Completely locked-in participants report being “happy”

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Tinnitus -- "ringing in the ears" -- affects an estimated 50 million Americans and is the leading service-related disability among U.S. veterans. Until recently, very little could be done for sufferers, but now a new, FDA-approved technology is successfully treating it. The Levo System mimics the buzzing, hissing, whistling or clicking sounds that many tinnitus sufferers describe and "trains" the brain to ignore them, thereby alleviating the condition entirely. To do this, patients wear earbuds at night while sleeping, when the brain is most responsive to sensory input.

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A new study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) is giving researchers a first look at the early stages of brain development in patients with Fragile X syndrome, a disorder that causes mild to severe intellectual disability and is the most common genetic cause of autism spectrum disorder.

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PHOENIX – Mayo Clinic researchers have found that engaging in mentally stimulating activities, even late in life, may protect against new-onset mild cognitive impairment, which is the intermediate stage between normal cognitive aging and dementia. The study found that cognitively normal people 70 or older who engaged in computer use, craft activities, social activities and playing games had a decreased risk of developing mild cognitive impairment. The results are published in the Jan. 30 edition of JAMA Neurology.

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Children who believe intelligence can grow pay more attention to and bounce back from their mistakes more effectively than kids who think intelligence is fixed, indicates a new study that measured the young participants’ brain waves.

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• Harvard Medical School scientists and colleagues from the Massachusetts General Hospital have partly restored hearing in mice with a genetic form of deafness. • Scientists altered a common virus, enhancing its ability to enter hair cells in the inner ear that are critical for hearing and to deliver a missing gene essential for hearing and balance. • The new approach overcomes a longstanding barrier to gene therapy for inherited and acquired deafness.

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By the age of 6, girls become less likely than boys to associate brilliance with their own gender and are more likely to avoid activities said to require brilliance, shows a new study conducted by researchers at New York University, the University of Illinois, and Princeton University.

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The study compared art students and social science students. The finding: art student sleep more hours, but reported more sleep disturbance and daytime dysfunction

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Adolescents who smoke marijuana as early as 14 do worse by 20 on some cognitive tests and drop out of school at a higher rate than non-smokers. But if they hold off until age 17, they're less at risk.

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The study, published Jan. 24, 2017, in Pediatrics, is the first to assess how implementation of a state-wide screening can pick up hearing loss in infants due to congenital cytomegalovirus.

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Mental sharpness in women begins to decline as early as their 50s. Cognitive processing speed, which includes speed of perception and reaction, showed an average decline of around 1 percent every two years and verbal memory declined on average around 1 percent every five years.

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Northwestern Medicine scientists showed for the first time that non-invasive brain stimulation can be used like a scalpel, rather than like a hammer, to cause a specific improvement in precise memory.Precise memory, rather than general memory, is critical for knowing details such as the specific color, shape and location of a building you are looking for, rather than simply knowing the part of town it’s in.

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Mandarin makes you more musical – and at a much earlier age than previously thought. That’s the suggestion of a new study from the University of California San Diego. But hold on there, overachiever parents, don’t’ rush just yet to sign your kids up for Chinese lessons instead of piano.

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A clinical trial of interactive book reading finds that children with Specific Language Impairment need to hear a word 36 times to learn it vs. 12 times for typically-developing children. Treatment materials are freely available to speech-language pathologists.

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Students who are given information and tell someone about it immediately recall the details better and longer — a strategy which could be a plus come test time, says a Baylor University researcher.

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University of Illinois at Chicago learning scientist Susan Goldman has been selected to receive the Society for Text and Discourse's 2017 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.

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Schools should use both ability grouping and acceleration to help academically talented students, reports a new Northwestern University study that examined a century of research looking at the controversial subject.

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Cognitive skills and experiences like classroom-based play in kindergarten lead to participation in extracurricular activities in 8th grade among children growing up in poverty, finds a new study led by NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

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In a perspective published January 6, 2017, in Science, Hamilton Farris, PhD, Associate Professor-Research at LSU Health New Orleans Neuroscience Center of Excellence, finds that the key insight of an important study is that perception can drive the evolution of observable traits.

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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.