Feature Channels: Cognition and Learning

• share
• favorite_border

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

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

Findings help advance understanding of social cognition and social development

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

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.

• share
• favorite_border

Encouraging children to enjoy a wide variety of toys allows them to develop fully, says lecturer Elizabeth Sweet.

• share
• favorite_border

In a study published this month in the journal Child Development, UW-Madison researcher Hilary Miller shows preschool age kids often skip location words and lean on other relevant information to describe important spatial details.

• share
• favorite_border

Learning by taking practice tests, a strategy known as retrieval practice, can protect memory against the negative effects of stress, report scientists from Tufts University in a new study published in Science on Nov. 25.

• share
• favorite_border

A study led jointly by research student Elham Taha from the laboratory of Prof. Kobi Rosenblum at the University of Haifa, and Christopher Heise from the laboratory of Professor Carlo Sala at the University of Milan, in cooperation with other European researchers. In a surprising finding, the study showed that a genetic change in the protein eEF2K creates resistance to epileptic attacks, thereby creating the possibility of a new treatment for the disease

• share
• favorite_border

Although both group and individual therapy can ease post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in active-duty military service members, individual therapy relieved PTSD symptoms better and quicker, according to a study led by a Duke University School of Medicine researcher. The randomized clinical trial is the largest to date to examine an evidence-based treatment for active-duty military service members, with 268 participants from the U.S. Army’s Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. Findings will be published Nov. 23 in JAMA Psychiatry.

• share
• favorite_border

Private speech is a good thing for a child’s cognitive development; however, it may be important that children monitor and repair errors in their speech, even when talking to themselves. Louis Manfra, assistant professor in the College of Human Environmental Sciences at the University of Missouri, found that children do, in fact, monitor their speech for errors, even without a listener. Manfra says parents and caregivers might encourage preschool-aged children to monitor their private speech by demonstrating such behavior in their own aloud private speech.

• share
• favorite_border

• Kidney damage was linked with worse performance on tests of global cognitive function, executive function, memory, and attention. • Kidney damage may also be linked with structural abnormalities in the brain. • Research that uncovered these findings will be presented at ASN Kidney Week 2016 November 15–20 at McCormick Place in Chicago, IL.

• share
• favorite_border

A new study explains brain mechanisms associated to the lack of sensitivity to music.

• share
• favorite_border

It has long been known to science that women find it easier than men to multitask and switch between tasks. But identifying exactly which areas of male and female brains respond differently and why has so far been unclear.

• share
• favorite_border

A study using Barbies and Transformers finds that men are better at recognizing Transformer faces while women are better at recognizing Barbie faces, supporting the theory that experience plays an important role in facial recognition.

• share
• favorite_border

An Indiana University physicist and neuroscientist who studies how physical movement can be used to detect autism in children and adults has received support from the National Science Foundation. The $750,000 NSF grant to IU scientist Jorge V. José and collaborators will be used to apply analytical methods pioneered at IU and Rutgers University toward diagnosing, and possibly treating, a wider range of learning disabilities.

• share
• favorite_border

A gene that regulates bone growth and muscle metabolism in mammals may take on an additional role as a promoter of brain maturation, cognition and learning in human and nonhuman primates, according to a new study led by neurobiologists at Harvard Medical School.

• share
• favorite_border

UAB launches study to see if family caregivers for dementia patients can benefit and improve quality of life from learning strategies to alter care-resistant behavior, such as refusal to take a bath, take medicine, accept routine mouth care, abstain from alcohol or go to a medical appointment.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers provide unprecedented evidence that basal forebrain pathology precedes and predicts both entorhinal pathology and memory impairment in people with Alzheimer's disease.

• share
• favorite_border

While schizophrenia is best known for episodes of psychosis – a break with reality during which an individual may experience delusions and hallucinations – it is also marked by chronic neurocognitive deficits, such as problems with memory and attention. A multi-site cognition study led by psychologists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) found that these neurocognitive symptoms are evident prior to the onset of psychosis in a high-risk stage of the disorder called the prodromal phase. The findings suggest that these impairments may serve as early warning signs of schizophrenia, as well as potential targets for intervention that could mitigate the onset of the psychotic disorder and significantly improve cognitive function.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin can now map what happens neurologically when new information influences a person to change his or her mind, a finding that offers more insight into the mechanics of learning.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers have developed a chemical compound that detects the Alzheimer’s protein amyloid beta better than current FDA-approved agents. The compound potentially could be used in brain scans to identify the signs of Alzheimer’s early, or to monitor response to treatment.

• share
• favorite_border

UCLA Health experts are available to discuss a wide variety of topics of interest for the month of November.