Feature Channels: Cognition and Learning

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德国神经退行性疾病中心发表在《Mayo Clinic学报》（Mayo Clinic Proceedings）的一项研究提供了新的证据，表明心肺健康与大脑健康存在关联，特别是在大脑灰质和脑总容量方面，它们与人的认知能力下降和衰老有关。

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Using novel imaging technologies, researchers produce first whole-brain atlas at single-cell resolution, revealing how alcohol addiction and abstinence remodel neural physiology and function in mice.

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Kardiorespiratorische Bewegung — schnelles Gehen, Joggen, Radfahren und so ziemlich jeder Sport, der ihren Puls hoch jagt — ist gut für Ihren Körper, aber kann er auch kognitive Veränderungen in Ihrem Gehirn verlangsamen?

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A University at Buffalo neuroimaging researcher has developed a computer model of the human brain that more realistically simulates actual patterns of brain impairment than existing methods. The novel advancement represents the union of two established approaches to create a digital simulation environment that could help stroke victims and patients with other brain injuries by serving as a testing ground for hypotheses about specific neurological damage.

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Les exercices cardiorespiratoires (la marche rapide, la course, le vélo et tout quasiment tout autre exercice qui fait battre votre cœur) sont bénéfiques pour votre corps, mais peuvent-ils également ralentir les changements cognitifs dans votre cerveau ?

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Exercício cardiorrespiratório — andar rápido, correr, pedalar e qualquer outro exercício que faça com que o coração bombeie mais sangue fazem bem para o corpo, mas será que eles também podem desacelerar as mudanças cognitivas no cérebro?

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Adverse outcomes from childhood exposures to lead and mercury are on the decline in the United States, likely due to decades of restrictions on the use of heavy metals, a new study finds.

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To better understand how motivational control processes help maximize performance when faced with task challenges, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and provide fascinating insights into the role of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) as a component network of brain regions that support motivated behavior. They have unified conflicting findings by discovering that the single mechanism of surprise best accounts for activity in dACC during a task requiring motivated control.

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An international research team has discovered a new genetic syndrome caused by mutation of a single gene and named it CATIFA, an acronym for its core symptoms: cleft palate, cataracts, tooth abnormality, intellectual disability, facial dysmorphism and ADHD. The investigators report in Nature Medicine that the new disease is caused by a defect in collagen secretion.

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An image of your retina may help determine your risk for Alzheimer’s disease even before other symptoms are detectable. Iowa State researchers will use the retinal images, cognitive measurements and economic data to determine if this information can identify risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

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El ejercicio cardiorrespiratorio, o sea, caminar rápido, correr, andar en bicicleta y prácticamente todo otro tipo de ejercicio que hace trabajar al corazón, es bueno para el cuerpo; pero, ¿puede también ralentizar los cambios cognitivos en el cerebro?

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Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania applied tools from network science to identify how anatomical connections in the brain develop to support neural activity underlying executive function.

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Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have successfully used a laser-assisted imaging tool to “see” what happens in brain cells of mice learning to reach out and grab a pellet of food. Their experiments, they say, add to evidence that such motor-based learning can occur in multiple areas of the brain, even ones not typically associated with motor control.

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A study in Mayo Clinic Proceedings from the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases provides new evidence of an association between cardiorespiratory fitness and brain health, particularly in gray matter and total brain volume — regions of the brain involved with cognitive decline and aging.

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The scientific community has long believed that beta-amyloid, a protein that can clump together and form sticky plaques in the brain, is the first sign of Alzheimer’s disease. Beta-amyloid then leads to other brain changes including neurodegeneration and eventually to thinking and memory problems. But a new study challenges that theory. The study suggests that subtle thinking and memory differences may come before, or happen alongside, the development of amyloid plaques that can be detected in the brain. The study is published in the December 30, 2019, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

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Teach a chimpanzee to fish for insects to eat, and you feed her for a lifetime. Teach her a better way to use tools in gathering prey, and you may change the course of evolution.For most wild chimpanzees, tool use is an important part of life — but learning these skills is no simple feat. Wild chimpanzees transfer tools to each other, and this behavior has previously been shown to serve as a form of teaching.

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Neuroscientists at Virginia Tech, University College London, and the University of London revealed brain mechanisms that underlie confirmation bias — a phenomenon where people strongly favor information that reinforces existing opinions over contradictory ones. The study, published this week in Nature Neuroscience, provides insight into a fundamental property of belief formation that has been documented by psychologists and economists, as well as in popular literature, including George Orwell’s “1984.”

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Students who are better able to understand and manage their emotions effectively, a skill known as emotional intelligence, do better at school than their less skilled peers, as measured by grades and standardized test scores, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

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A review of more than 130 studies explains how sleep helps people learn new information and plays an important role in storing learned content for future use. The review is published in the January 2020 issue of Physiology.

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Brain imaging of veterans with Gulf War illness show varying abnormalities after moderate exercise that can be categorized into two distinct groups — an outcome that suggests a more complex illness that previously thought.

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Using a targeted gene epigenome editing approach in the developing mouse brain, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers reversed one gene mutation that leads to the genetic disorder WAGR syndrome, which causes intellectual disability and obesity in people. This specific editing was unique in that it changed the epigenome — how the genes are regulated — without changing the actual genetic code of the gene being regulated.

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Scientists were surprised when they found out that metformin caused the secretion of GDF15, a protein which is known to suppress appetite.

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Barbecued, stir-fried or roasted, there’s no doubt that Aussies love their meat. Consuming on average nearly 100 kilograms of meat per person per year, Australians are among the top meat consumers worldwide. But with statistics showing that most Australians suffer from a poor diet, and red meat production adding to greenhouse-gas emissions, finding a balance between taste preferences, environmental protection, and health benefits is becoming critical.

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The brightest minds in neuroscience came together Nov. 21 for the UCI Brain Launch Event, an interdisciplinary academic initiative set to define and expand the horizons of brain research at UCI and beyond. More than 700 attended the day-long symposium at the Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences & Engineering, where Michael Yassa, director of UCI Brain, introduced a host of new technologies that redefine brain research, including a collaboration with the Claire Trevor School of the Arts.

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(New York, NY – November 19, 2019) Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital announced today that it has partnered with the Bezos Family Foundation and Vroom, the Foundation’s early learning program. Their shared purpose involves transforming the environment of six highly trafficked clinic spaces throughout the hospital into places for adults and children to have high-quality interactions that enhance early brain development during the critical years from birth to age five.

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Why do some people learn music more quickly than others? Intelligence could play a role, according to a Michigan State University study that investigated the early stages of learning to play piano.

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To help children learn to read earlier, one thing appears to be key: Learn the letters and sounds associated with the letters as early as possible. This may sound obvious, but another theory has suggested that children should first learn to read the letters in the context of words instead.

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A new study finds that cognitive impairment begins in the earliest stages of age-related hearing loss—when hearing is still considered normal.

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New research has found that people who are illiterate, meaning they never learned to read or write, may have nearly three times greater risk of developing dementia than people who can read and write. The study is published in the November 13, 2019, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

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Professor Karen Adolph, who studies infants as they make their first crawls and steps, will outline how we learn to move in “Learning to Move and Moving to Learn,” a public lecture, on Mon., Nov. 18.

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In a new study, scientists observed several simultaneous reactions in mice given a common chemotherapy drug: Their gut bacteria and tissue changed, their blood and brains showed signs of inflammation, and their behaviors suggested they were fatigued and cognitively impaired.

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New research from Michigan State University tested how open monitoring meditation – or, meditation that focuses awareness on feelings, thoughts or sensations as they unfold in one's mind and body – altered brain activity in a way that suggests increased error recognition.

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In 1992, Teen Talk Barbie was released with the controversial voice fragment, "Math class is hard." While the toy's release met with public backlash, this underlying assumption persists

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How well eight-year-olds score on a test of thinking skills may be a predictor of how they will perform on tests of thinking and memory skills when they are 70 years old, according to a study published in the October 30, 2019, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study also found that education level and socioeconomic status were also predictors of thinking and memory performance. Socioeconomic status was determined by people’s occupation at age 53.

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A new study from Columbia University found that a higher level of education protected against cognitive decline in black people with a gene linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

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Spending an hour in talk therapy with a trained counselor costs much more, and takes more time, than swallowing an inexpensive antidepressant pill. But for people with a new diagnosis of major depression, the costs and benefits of the two approaches end up being equal after five years, a new study shows.

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What can reading 26,000 books tell researchers about how language environment affects language behavior? Brendan T. Johns, an assistant professor of communicative disorders and sciences at UB has published a computational modeling study that suggests our experience and interaction with specific learning environments, like the characteristics of what we read, leads to differences in language behavior that were once attributed to differences in cognition.

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Prior to an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, a person in the early stages of the disease faces a heightened risk of adverse financial outcomes — a likely consequence of compromised decision making when managing money, in addition to exploitation and fraud by others.

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Exposure during the first trimester of pregnancy to mixtures of suspected endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in consumer products is related to lower IQ in children by age 7, according to a study by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Karlstad University, Sweden, published in Environment International in October. This study is among the first to look at prenatal suspected endocrine-disrupting chemical mixtures in relation to neurodevelopment.

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Gulf War Illness (GWI) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) share symptoms of disabling fatigue, pain, systemic hyperalgesia (tenderness), negative emotion, sleep and cognitive dysfunction that are made worse after mild exertion (postexertional malaise). Now, neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have evidence, derived from human brain studies, that GWI and CFS are two distinct disorders that affect the brain in opposing ways.

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Georgetown neuroscientists say they have identified how people can have a “crash in visual processing” — a bottleneck of feedforward and feedback signals that can cause us not to be consciously aware of stimuli that our brain recognized.

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As Farzan Irani, an associate professor in Texas State University’s Department of Communication Disorders, and his peers have analyzed the components that contribute to stuttering issues for kids and adults, they are now addressing the issues from a multilingual perspective.

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Families dealing with the stress and frustration of their child’s overly picky eating habits may have a new addition to their parental toolbox. Pediatric researchers describe a brief group cognitive-behavioral therapy program that provides parents with specific techniques to improve their child’s mealtime behaviors and expand the range of foods their children will eat.

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In recent weeks, presidential candidates pledged billions of dollars to bring broadband and internet access to rural America. That’s a good start, but the issue that the candidates need to address goes far beyond technology. It’s troubling that no candidate has begun to identify a strategy to concentrate on a more sweeping problem: More and more young people in our nation’s rural communities look at their hometowns and realize those places simply can’t support their dreams.

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Rush is part of national study to test effects of lifestyle intervention on older adults at risk for dementia.

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Deaf infants who have been exposed to American Sign Language are better at following an adult’s gaze than their hearing peers, supporting the idea that social-cognitive development is sensitive to different kinds of life experiences.

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A University of Washington-led study finds that Deaf infants exposed to American Sign Language are especially tuned to a parent's eye gaze, itself a social connection between parent and child that is linked to early learning.

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Immigrant parents worry their children will struggle learning English and fret that as non-English speakers, they can’t help. A new study in the journal Child Development shows that’s simply not true. Reading to a young child in any language will help them learn to read in English.