Feature Channels: Cognition and Learning

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A new study suggests there may be genetic explanations for why some children with poor language also have poor mental health.

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A new study, published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, suggests that the time adolescents are spending on their phones and online is not that bad.

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New research shows baby babbling changes the way parents speak to their infants, suggesting that infants are shaping their own learning environments.

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Early-life exposure to the mineral manganese disrupts the way different areas of the brain involved in cognitive ability and motor control connect in teenagers, Mount Sinai researchers report in a study published in PLOS ONE in August.

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A genetic mutation that slowed down the development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in two or more children may have triggered a cascade of events leading to acquisition of recursive language and modern imagination 70,000 years ago.

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When it comes to challenging young minds to grow language, asking how and why during shared book reading to preschoolers can be more beneficial, according to new research at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

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Some older adults without noticeable cognitive problems have a harder time than younger people in separating irrelevant information from what they need to know at a given time, and a new Johns Hopkins University study could explain why.

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Adults are really good at paying attention only to what you tell them to – but children don’t ignore anything. That difference can actually help children do better than adults in some learning situations, a new study suggests.

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Mammal brains — including those of humans — store and recall impressive amounts of information based on our good and bad decisions and interactions in an ever-changing world. Now, in a series of new experiments with mice, scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine report they have added to evidence that such “decision-based” memories are stored in very particular parts of the brain.

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New research by neuroscientists at the University of Chicago shows that the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), an area of the brain often associated with planning movements and spatial awareness, also plays a crucial role in making decisions about images in the field of view.

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The males of one species of butterfly are more attracted to females that are active, not necessarily what they look like, according to a recent research conducted at Augustana University.The paper, “Behaviour before beauty: Signal weighting during mate selection in the butterfly Papilio polytes,” found that males of the species noticed the activity levels of potential female mates, not their markings.

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Irvine, Calif., July 2, 2019 – Social status matters, even to infants between 10 and 16 months old, according to a new study by two University of California, Irvine cognitive scientists. Published online in Current Biology, the research found that in staged confrontations between two puppets, babies preferred the one who deferred.

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Researchers examined the impact of preterm birth on language outcomes in preschoolers born preterm and full-term, using both standardized assessment and language sample analysis. They also explored semantic skills and grammatical ability, and nonlinguistic developmental skills of nonverbal intelligence, attention, and hyperactivity. Results show that language difficulties at the discourse level may still exist even when children who are born preterm appear to be developing typically when they are evaluated by standardized assessments of global language ability, cognition, and attention.

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Scientists consider how unexpected awakenings in dementia patients might shed new light on the disease.

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Your kids are probably crazy about those interactive, flashy, customizable digital toys.

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A new study by researchers at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business has found that information acts on the brain's dopamine-producing reward system in the same way as money or food.

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Kate Zinsser and researchers at UIC conducted a preliminary investigation of Illinois early childhood programs’ current and prior expulsion practices, in addition to their understanding of and responses to the new law.

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If you're looking for health and fitness story ideas, view these research highlights from the May 2019 issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise®, ACSM’s flagship journal. ACSM is the largest sports medicine and exercise science organization in the world.

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Growing up in poverty and experiencing traumatic events like a bad accident or sexual assault were linked to accelerated puberty and brain maturation, abnormal brain development, and greater mental health disorders, such as depression, anxiety, and psychosis, according to a new Penn Medicine study published this week in JAMA Psychiatry.

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Stephen V. Faraone, PhD, Distinguished Professor at Upstate and a leading researcher on ADHD, has been elected president of the World Federation of ADHD.

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Results of a pilot study conducted by researchers from the National University of Singapore provided evidence that an artificial intelligence known as CURATE.AI has the potential to enhance learning, and could pave the way for promising applications in personalised digital therapy, including the prevention of cognitive decline.

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A team of NIH-funded researchers at Stanford University Medical School has found that children with autism improved measurably on a test of socialization and learning when their therapy included an at-home intervention with Google Glass. The smart system of eye wear and mobile-phone-based games helped the children with autism understand emotions conveyed in facial expressions.

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Conversation is an important part of what makes us human. Previous research has shown that children begin to develop this skill at a young age. While many assume that mothers instigate communication with their children, new research suggests that children are the ones who get the conversation started. “I was surprised that kids were drivers of conversation,” said Mark VanDam, who will present his team’s research findings at the 177th ASA Meeting, May 13-17.

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The different soundscapes of NICUs has recently attracted interest in how changes in what we hear in our earliest days might affect language development in the brain. One ongoing study is hoping to better understand these differences by painting a clearer picture of what kinds of sounds full-term infants are exposed to in the womb. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are conducting one of the first studies on how often full-term fetuses hear spoken language before birth. They will present their preliminary findings at the 177th ASA Meeting, May 13-17.

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Rewards are necessary for learning, but may actually mask true knowledge, finds a new Johns Hopkins University study with rodents and ferrets.

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Children glean all kinds of information from the people around them. In particular, children mimic and learn speech patterns from their family. Previous work has shown that infants attend selectively to their mother’s voice over another female’s voice. But new research suggests that children learn new words best from other children. Yuanyuan Wang will present research findings from a collaborative work with Amanda Seidl from Purdue University at the 177th ASA Meeting, May 13-17.

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The general public largely views the use of cognitive enhancers such as Adderall as an acceptable practice when used by adults in the workplace, suggests a new study from Penn Medicine neurologists, which published this week in AJOB Neuroscience.

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Neurobiologists have located the brain area responsible for value decisions. Data from thousands of neurons revealed an area of the brain called the retrosplenial cortex, previously not known for “value-based decision-making,” a behavior that is impaired in a range of neurological conditions.

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When it comes to learning a language, the left side of the brain has traditionally been considered the hub of language processing. But new research from the University of Delaware shows the right brain plays a critical early role in helping learners identify the basic sounds associated with a language. That could help find new teaching methods to better improve student success in picking up a foreign language.

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Leonardo Da Vinci's spelling problems may have aided his artistic genius.

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A study of 70 mothers and their infants suggests that the impact of maternal stress on neurodevelopment is detectable by electroencephalography (EEG) at 2 months of age.

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The loss of memory and cognitive function known to afflict survivors of septic shock is the result of a sugar that is released into the blood stream and enters the brain during the life-threatening condition.

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Research from the University of Washington uses functional MRI to identify two differences in the brains of blind individuals -- differences that might be responsible for their abilities to make better use of auditory information.

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Smokers who are trying to quit may not always have to reach for a piece of nicotine gum to stave off a craving. Deliberately inhaling a pleasant aroma may be enough to reduce the urge to light up, at least temporarily, and could be used as part of an effective smoking cessation strategy, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

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Imagine a future technology that would provide instant access to the world's knowledge and artificial intelligence, simply by thinking about a specific topic or question. Communications, education, work, and the world as we know it would be transformed.

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Teenagers with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may benefit from more sleep to help them focus, plan and control their emotions. The findings—the first of their kind in young people with ADHD—will be presented today at the American Physiological Society’s (APS) annual meeting at Experimental Biology 2019 in Orlando, Fla.

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Western Illinois University Department of Computer Sciences Associate Professor Justin Ehrlich received funding for the development of a virtual reality (VR) program designed to improve social competencies for students with high functioning autism and learning disabilities.

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Young children whose parents read them five books a day enter kindergarten having heard about 1.4 million more words than kids who were never read to, a new study found.

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Alterations in functional connectivity of the brain may help in understanding the neurobiological changes leading to somatic symptom disorder (SSD), reports a study in Psychosomatic Medicine: Journal of Biobehavioral Medicine, the official journal of the American Psychosomatic Society. The journal is published in the Lippincott Portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

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Children born into poverty show key differences in early brain function - according to new research from the University of East Anglia.

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Learning one's native language may seem effortless. One minute, we're babbling babies. The next we're in school reciting Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech or Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice."

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Musical training produces lasting improvements to a cognitive mechanism that helps individuals be more attentive and less likely to be distracted by irrelevant stimuli while performing demanding tasks.

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In a recent learning study they were able to show that new conceptual information is stored along spatial dimensions in form of a mental map located in the hippocampus. Together with colleagues from the Donders Institute at Radboud University in Nijmegen, they observed brain activity patterns that support the idea that the neural mechanisms that support navigation in physical space might also be involved in conceptual learning.

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Traditional print books may have an edge over e-books when it comes to quality time shared between parents and their children, a new study suggests.

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Adult depression has long been associated with shrinkage of the hippocampus, a brain region that plays an important role in memory and response to stress. Now, new research from Washington University in St. Louis has linked participation in team sports to larger hippocampal volumes in children and less depression in boys ages 9 to 11.

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Prof. Noam Sobel's team at the Weizmann Institute of Science has shown that we do better on tests when we inhale at the same time we’re presented with a problem. The findings shed light on the evolution of the brain, and may lead to ways of helping people who have attention and learning disorders improve their skills.

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Researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine used MRI brain scans and machine learning techniques at birth to predict cognitive development at age 2 years with 95 percent accuracy.

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Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a new method of statistical analysis, researchers have discovered the taste center in the human brain by uncovering which parts of the brain distinguish different types of tastes.

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Whether it’s probing a child’s understanding of a topic through questions or engaging in hands-on activities alongside them, parents can guide their children to learn in new ways through simple directions, according to a study by psychology researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.