Feature Channels: Cognition and Learning

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New Research from Wellesley College and the University of Kansas Shows People Observe the Body Differently When Assessing Friends vs. Mates

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Around one third of fake images went undetected in a recent study by the University of Warwick, UK.

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A new study by the University of Washington, published July 17 in Mind, Brain, and Education, is among the first to investigate how babies can learn a second language outside of the home. The researchers sought to answer a fundamental question: Can babies be taught a second language if they don’t get foreign language exposure at home, and if so, what kind of foreign language exposure, and how much, is needed to spark that learning?

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Emergency and urgent hospitalizations are associated with an increased rate of cognitive decline in older adults, report researchers at Rush University Medical Center. The results of their study suggest that hospitalization may be a more of a major risk factor for long-term cognitive decline in older adults than previously recognized.

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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is the most frequently used psychological intervention for people with chronic pain, and new approaches for improving CBT outcomes may be found in the psychological flexibility model and Acceptance and Commitment therapy (ACT), according to research reported in The Journal of Pain, published by the American Pain Society, www.americanpainsociety.org.

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A recent study at the University of Pennsylvania found that, not only did commercial brain training with Lumosity™ have no effect on decision-making, it also had no effect on cognitive function beyond practice effects on the training tasks.

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Researchers have identified a rare genetic syndrome characterized by intellectual disability, seizures, an abnormal gait and distinctive facial features. The scientists pinpointed variants in the WDR26 gene as causes for this distinctive, yet unnamed condition. Their early research provides initial information for counseling patients and families coping with uncertainties for children with the rare, poorly recognized condition.

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A new research article proposes that more attention be given to what’s right with children who grow up in high-stress environments so their unique strengths and abilities can be used to more effectively tailor education, jobs and interventions to fit them. Stress-adapted children and youth possess traits — such as heightened vigilance, attention shifting and empathic accuracy — that aren’t tapped in traditional learning and testing situations. In addition, these skills may actually allow at-risk children to perform better than their peers from low-risk backgrounds when faced with uncertainty and stress.

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Watching television sometimes gets a bad rap––especially where children and screen time are concerned––but not all of it's deserved.

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Researchers have identified gut microbiota that interact with brain regions associated with mood and behavior. This may be the first time that behavioral and neurobiological differences associated with microbial composition in healthy humans have been identified.

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Latest research highlights from ACSM

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New study shows your cognitive capacity is significantly reduced when your smartphone is within reach — even if it’s off.

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A late bedtime is associated with lower perceived control of obsessive thoughts, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

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A four-year study conducted by researchers from the National University of Singapore showed that a combination of nutritional, physical and cognitive interventions can reverse physical frailty in elderly people.

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Memories that stick with us for a lifetime are those that fit in with a lot of other things we remember – but have a slightly weird twist. It’s this notion of ‘peculiarity’ that can help us understand what makes lasting memories.

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Parents of prematurely born babies often fear their children may go on to struggle in school, but findings from a new large-scale study from the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University and Northwestern Medicine should reassure parents.

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Kinesthetic classrooms are not new, but the URI project is breaking new ground by measuring language patterns and usage in the context of movement. No other school is studying a kinesthetic classroom in a controlled manner, and no other school is looking at connections between movement, language and being on task, the researchers said.

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It has been difficult to tell whether neural entrainment is specialized for spoken language. In a new study, University of Chicago scholars designed an experiment using sign language to answer that question.

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The first ever longitudinal study of U.S. Chinese older adults in the greater Chicago area found the cognitive and physical function of U.S. Chinese immigrants may be greatly impacted by their social and cultural context more than non-immigrant populations.

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Repeated exposure to a common anesthesia drug early in life results in visual recognition memory impairment, which emerges after the first year of life and may persist long-term, according to a study from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published online May 31 in The British Journal of Anaesthesia.

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A new study published by Penn Medicine researchers this month and featured on the cover of the Journal of Neuroscience reveals that while volume indeed decreases from childhood to young adulthood, gray matter density actually increases.

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In a new study, published this week in Current Biology, a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers report newly mapped changes in the network organization of the brain that underlie those improvements in executive function. The findings could provide clues about risks for certain mental illnesses.

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Most people know that regular exercise can keep a body looking and feeling young. What about the brain? Michigan Medicine researchers were recently awarded a two-year grant to further examine the role physical activity plays on the brain.

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To understand numbers, you need culture, says UC San Diego cognitive scientist Rafael Nunez, arguing against the current conventional wisdom that numerical cognition is biologically endowed.

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Technology continues to change the way students learn. That's why Emily Howell, an assistant professor in Iowa State’s School of Education, is working with teachers to develop new ways to incorporate digital tools in the classroom, including games such as Pokémon GO.

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The content of a children’s book – not its form as a print book or a digital book – predicts how well children understand a story, finds a new study by NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

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UW-Madison researchers are part of an effort to develop a low-cost, easy-to-use system that aims to accelerate learning by stimulating nerves in the head and neck to boost neural activity in the brain.

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This discovery, described online in the April 25 edition of eLife, will lead to important research and may one day help experts develop new and better therapies for Alzheimer's and other forms of cognitive decline.

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Winner of the Philip L. Gildenberg MD Resident Award, Sarah Kathleen Bourne Bick, MD, presented her research, Caudate Stimulation Enhances Human Associative Learning, during the 2017 American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) Annual Scientific Meeting.

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New research from Sandia published in Neuropsychologia shows that working memory training combined with a kind of noninvasive brain stimulation can lead to cognitive improvement under certain conditions. Improving working memory or cognitive strategies could be very valuable for training people faster and more efficiently.

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A Georgetown physician-researcher has launched a first-of-its-kind study to test a medical care model that could change the way people with multiple sclerosis (MS) are treated.

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Context can alter something as basic as our ability to estimate the weights of simple objects. As we learn to manipulate those objects, context can even tease out the interplay of two memory systems and shows how distraction can affect multitasking.

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A new study of Spanish-English bilingual children finds that when children learn any two languages from birth each language proceeds on its own independent course, at a rate that reflects the quality of the children’s exposure to each language.

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Researchers have found children up to early teenagers lack the perceptual judgment and motor skills to safely cross a busy road consistently. Children placed in realistic, simulated environments were tested for their road-crossing abilities. Those from 6 to 12 years of age had trouble crossing the street, with accident rates as high as 8 percent with 6-year-olds. Results appear in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

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A study by the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) shows the potential of synchronized movement in helping young children develop collaborative skills. The measured, synchronous movement of children on the swings can encourage preschoolers to cooperate on subsequent activities, UW researchers have found.

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New research by Adam Anderson, professor of human development at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology, reveals why the eyes offer a window into the soul. According to the recent study, in Psychological Science, we interpret a person’s emotions by analyzing the expression in their eyes – a process that began as a universal reaction to environmental stimuli and evolved to communicate our deepest emotions.

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Everybody loves those rare “aha moments” where you suddenly and unexpectedly solve a difficult problem or understand something that had previously perplexed you. But until now, researchers had not had a good way to study how people actually experienced what is called “epiphany learning.”

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People generally make decisions using two ways of thinking: They think consciously, deliberate for a while, and try to use logic to figure out what action to take – referred to as analytical cognition. Or people unconsciously recognize patterns in certain situations, get a "gut feeling," and take action based on that feeling; in other words, they use intuitive cognition.

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Acute psychosocial stress leads to increased empathy and prosocial behavior. An international team of researchers led by Claus Lamm from the University of Vienna investigated the effects of stress on neural mechanisms and tested the relationship between empathy and prosocial behavior in a new experiment. The study has just been published in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

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When “the dress” went viral in 2015, millions were divided on its true colors: gold and white or black and blue? In a new study, an NYU neuroscientist concludes that these differences in perception are due to our assumptions about how the dress was illuminated.

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EyesOnALZ (http://eyesonalz.com) – a project to crowdsource Alzheimer’s research is launching an online competition to #CrushALZ on April 6th, in partnership with The Crowd & The Cloud – a public television documentary series about citizen science.

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Using data from brain imaging techniques that enable visualising the brain’s activity, a neuroscientist at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and a Parisian ENT surgeon have managed to decipher brain reorganisation processes at work when people start to lose their hearing, and thus predict the success or failure of a cochlear implant among people who have become profoundly deaf in their adult life. The results of this research may be found in Nature Communications.

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For the first time, researchers have found a biological basis for financial exploitation in the elderly. The team is led by a Cornell University scientist with collaborators at York University in Toronto.

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By measuring brainwaves, it is possible to predict what a child’s reading level will be years in advance, according to research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

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In a first-of-its-kind study published in the March 1, 2017 edition of Molecular Therapy, researchers from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine showed that gene therapy was able to restore balance and hearing in genetically modified mice that mimic Usher Syndrome, a genetic condition in humans characterized by partial or total hearing loss, dizziness, and vision loss that worsens over time. The hearing loss and dizziness is caused by abnormalities of the inner ear.

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A unique institute is being formed to develop and investigate the forward-thinking ideas of eminent British physicist Sir Roger Penrose. To be based in San Diego, California, with collaborations in London and Oxford in the UK, and Tucson, Arizona, the Institute will examine the interplay between quantum mechanics and general relativity and the possible implications on our understanding of consciousness.

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A study led by Assistant Professor Feng Lei from National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine has found that regular consumption of tea lowers the risk of cognitive decline in the elderly, and this is especially so for APOE e4 gene carriers who are genetically at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

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Researchers from the University of Hawaii and Brigham Young University set out to determine college students’ perception of the terms real meal, meal, and snack and how those perceptions might enable more effective nutrition education. The results of this study are published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.