Preschool children with relatively poor language skills improve more if they are placed in classrooms with high-achieving students, a new study found.
Kennedy Krieger researchers find that varying practice sessions may benefit people with motor disorders.
Scientists have developed a way to evaluate new treatments for some forms of attention deficit disorder. Working in mice, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis used brain scans to quickly test whether drugs increase levels of a brain chemical known as dopamine.
In a study of 300 post-menopausal women, obese participants performed better on three cognitive tests than participants of normal weight, leading researchers to speculate about the role of sex hormones and cognition.
New research suggests the growth rate of the brain’s cerebral cortex in babies born prematurely may predict how well they are able to think, speak, plan and pay attention later in childhood. The research is published in the October 12, 2011, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The cerebral cortex is the outer layer of the brain covering the cerebrum, and is responsible for cognitive functions, such as language, memory, attention and thought.
A new study presents the first evidence that a basic sense of fairness and altruism appears in infancy. Babies as young as 15 months perceived the difference between equal and unequal distribution of food, and their awareness of equal rations was linked to their willingness to share a toy.
UCLA researchers have discovered there is an optimal brain frequency for changing synaptic strength for learning. And further, like stations on a radio dial, each synapse is tuned to a different optimal frequency.
Every year millions of babies and toddlers receive general anesthesia for procedures ranging from hernia repair to ear surgery. Now, researchers at Mayo Clinic in Rochester have found a link among children undergoing multiple surgeries requiring general anesthesia before age 2 and learning disabilities later in childhood.
Older people with low blood levels of vitamin B12 markers may be more likely to have lower brain volumes and have problems with their thinking skills, according to researchers at Rush University Medical Center. The results of the study are published in the Sept. 27 issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Older people with low levels of vitamin B12 in their blood may be more likely to lose brain cells and develop problems with their thinking skills, according to a study published in the September 27, 2011, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Foods that come from animals, including fish, meat, especially liver, milk, eggs and poultry, are usually sources of vitamin B12.
First randomized clinical trial of postnatal DHA supplementation of infant formula to measure attention shows cognitive and cardiac benefits.
Wouldn’t it be nice if all those hours kids spent glued to their PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 or Nintendo DS video games actually resulted in something tangible? Better grades, perhaps? Improved concentration? Superior driving skills?
Study reveals link between early number sense and elementary math scores.
How doctors, nurses and other health care professionals can be better prepared to reduce medical mistakes and improve patient care is the focus of several studies published in a special issue of the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
Young children who watch fast-paced, fantastical television shows may become handicapped in their readiness for learning, according to a new University of Virginia study published in the October issue of the journal Pediatrics.
Study indicates infants at risk for autism could benefit from motor training.
Researchers at the University of Washington are investigating the brain mechanisms that contribute to infants’ prowess at learning languages, with the hope that the findings could boost bilingualism in adults, too. In a new study, the researchers report that the brains of babies raised in bilingual households show a longer period of being flexible to different languages and the relative amount of each language – English and Spanish – babies were exposed to affected their vocabulary as toddlers.
Language task reveals that the brains of older people are not slower but rather wiser than young brains, which allows older adults to achieve an equivalent level of performance.
Every day we make thousands of tiny predictions — when the bus will arrive, who is knocking on the door, whether the dropped glass will break. Now, in a first-of-a-kind study, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are unravelling the process by which the brain makes these everyday prognostications.
We accept that some people are born with a talent for music or art or athletics. But what about mathematics? Do some of us just arrive in the world with better math skills than others?
Chaser, a border collie who can identify more than 1,000 objects and distinguish between nouns and verbs, will show off her vocabulary skills in a presentation at the American Psychological Association’s 119th Annual Convention.
It’s no secret that exercise has numerous beneficial effects on the body. However, a bevy of recent research suggests that these positive effects also extend to the brain, influencing cognition.
Long before they can speak, infants hear words that greatly shape their development. An experiment found that infants who heard objects referred to by individual names showed a pattern of brain activity suggestive of holistic processing while infants who learned generic labels for objects did not.
A Stony Brook University School of Medicine study concludes that there do not appear to be any negative associations between bedsharing in toddlerhood and children’s behavior and cognition at age 5.
Ever get the heebie-jeebies at a wax museum? Feel uneasy with an anthropomorphic robot? What about playing a video game or watching an animated movie, where the human characters are pretty realistic but just not quite right and maybe a bit creepy? If yes, then you’ve probably been a visitor to what’s called the “uncanny valley.”
In the first study of its kind in , cognitive psychologist Justin J. Couchman has demonstrated that rhesus monkeys have a sense of self-agency and possess a form of self awareness previously not attributed to them.
Researchers have identified when an important milestone in infants’ development occurs: the ability to transfer knowledge to new situations.
Long-term exposure to air pollution can lead to physical changes in the brain, as well as learning and memory problems and even depression, new research in mice suggests.
A longstanding medical mystery – why so many people with HIV experience memory loss and other cognitive problems despite potent antiretroviral therapy – may have been solved by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. Their findings are published in the June 29 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.
A little practice goes a long way, according to researchers at McMaster University, who have found the effects of practice on the brain have remarkable staying power.
Picture a menacing drill sergeant, a gory slaughterhouse, a devastating scene of a natural disaster. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found that viewing such emotion-laden images immediately after taking a test actually enhances people’s retention of the tested material.
Study reveals math learning disabilities are caused by multiple factors, including poor intuition in gauging numerical quantities.
Preschool children seem to grasp the true concept of counting only if they are taught to understand the number value of groups of objects greater than three. Seeing that there are three objects doesn’t have to involve counting. It’s only when children go beyond three that counting is necessary to determine how many objects there are, researchers contend.
There are many complicated theories on how the brain processes more than one language but a University of Kansas scientist found that how words sound provides enough information to distinguish which language a word belongs to.
Recent sleep research has focused on memory, but results of a new study suggest another key effect of sleep is enhancing complex cognitive skills such as decision-making. One of the first studies of its kind supports the adage that “sleeping on it” is good advice when facing an important decision.
How human children acquire language remains largely a mystery. A groundbreaking study by cognitive scientists at The Johns Hopkins University confirms that human beings are born with knowledge of certain syntactical rules that make learning human languages easier.
Many patients who undergo bone marrow or blood stem cell transplantation to treat blood cancers or a “pre-leukemic” condition called myelodysplasia experience a decline in mental and fine motor skills due to the toll of their disease and its treatment. A new study led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, published in the May 2, 2011 online edition of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, found that overall, these effects are largely temporary and that most patients can expect a return to normal motor and memory function within five years. However, the study also found that deficits in fine motor skills and verbal memory remained for a significant percentage of patients and warrant more attention by health care providers.
If you’ve ever lost your keys or stuck the milk in the cupboard and the cereal in the refrigerator, you may have been the victim of a tired brain region that was taking a quick nap.
According to research conducted at Rush University Medical Center, frequent social activity may help to prevent or delay cognitive decline in old age. The study has just been posted online in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.
Functional MRI shows that Buddhist meditators use different areas of the brain than other people when confronted with unfair choices, enabling them to make decisions rationally rather than emotionally.
University of Utah psychologists have learned why many people experience “inattention blindness” – the phenomenon that leaves drivers on cell phones prone to traffic accidents and makes a gorilla invisible to viewers of a famous video.
Across many groups of animals, species with bigger brains often have better cognitive abilities. But it’s been unclear whether overall brain size or the size of specific brain areas is the key. New findings by University of Washington neurobiologists suggest that both patterns are important: bigger-bodied social wasps had larger brains and devoted up to three times more of their brain tissue to regions that coordinate social interactions, learning, memory and other complex behaviors.
Laboratories at University of New Mexico, Brown University, and House Ear Institute developed a new technique to observe herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV1) infections growing inside cells. Re-activation and growth of HSV1 infections contribute to cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have developed a new way to stimulate neuron production in the adult mouse brain, demonstrating that neurons acquired in the brain's hippocampus during adulthood improve certain cognitive functions.
Toy libraries offer multiple benefits for children, their parents, their community, and society in general.
New research brings scientists one step closer to to isolating the mechanisms by which the brain compensates for disruptions and reroutes neural functioning – which could ultimately lead to treatments for cognitive impairments in humans caused by disease and aging.
It is no surprise to scientists that the largest social network on the web is called Facebook. Identifying people by their face is fundamental to our social interactions, one of the primary reasons vision researchers are trying to find out how our brain processes facial identity. In a study recently published in the Journal of Vision, scientists used an original approach — a method that “shakes” the brain gently and repeatedly by making an image appear and disappear at a constant rate — to evaluate its sensitivity to perceiving facial identity. The technique is called steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP).
Using a sophisticated imaging test to probe for higher-level cognitive functioning in severely brain-injured patients provides a window into consciousness -- but the view it presents is one that is blurred in fascinating ways, say researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in the Feb. 25 online edition of the journal Brain.
Mothers who are depressed respond differently to their crying babies than do non-depressed moms. In fact, their reaction, according to brain scans at the University of Oregon, is much more muted than the robust brain activity in non-depressed moms.
Language may play an important role in learning the meanings of numbers. A study of deaf people in Nicaragua who never learned sign language showed that people who communicate using self-developed gestures, were unable to comprehend the value of numbers greater than three because they had not learned a language containing symbols used for counting.
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