Monday, March 02, 2009

A common brain substrate for evaluating physical and social space.

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From Yamakawa et al , work that is consonant with models of embodied cognition (cf. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson ) : Across cultures, soc...
Friday, February 27, 2009

Gesture and language acquisition

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Gestures precede speech development and, after speech development, continue to enrich the communication process. Comparing how young childre...
4 comments:

Followup on genes and language

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I wanted to pass on some summary clips from a review by Berwick of the paper featured in a Feb. 12 post on an article by Chater et al. ( &...
Thursday, February 26, 2009

Envy and Schadenfreude in the brain.

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Takahasi et al. show that experiencing envy at another person's success activates pain-related neural circuitry, whereas experiencing s...

Fetal testosterone predicts male-typical play.

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In a survey of several hundred births (112 male, 100 female), Auyeung et al. have found a significant relationship between fetal testoste...
Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Monoamine oxidase A gene predicts aggression following provocation

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From McDermott et al. : Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) has earned the nickname “warrior gene” because it has been linked to aggression in o...

Musical training enhances linguistic abilities in children

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An interesting report from Moreno et al. in the journal Cerebral Cortex. They: ...conducted a longitudinal study with 32 nonmusician child...
3 comments:
Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Training your working memory increases your cortical Dopamine D1 receptors

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McNab et al demonstrate training-induced brain changes that indicate an unexpectedly high level of plasticity of our cortical dopamine D1 ...

Malthusian information famine

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A view of our information future from Charles Seife: ...Vast amounts of digital memory will change the relationship that humans have with i...
Monday, February 23, 2009

Some Chopin for a Monday morning.

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This is Chopin's Nocture Op. 9 No. 1, which I recorded last May. I miss my Steinway B grand piano back in Wisconsin during my current sn...

How we decide how big a reward is...

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Furlong and Opfer do a nice set of experiments showing that we can be lured into making decisions by numbers that seem bigger than they rea...
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Similar risk assessment in man and mouse.

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In an open access article Balci et al. devise a simple and clever timing task which captures the essence of temporal decision making that c...
1 comment:
Friday, February 20, 2009

How cute is that baby's face - hormones regulate the answer.

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Sprengelmeyer et al. make some interesting observations suggesting that female reproductive hormones increase sensitivity to variations in ...
1 comment:

Modulation of the brain's emotion circuits by facial muscle feedback

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Several studies have shown that facial muscle contractions associated with various emotions can induce or enhance the correlated emotional f...
Thursday, February 19, 2009

The smell of fear modulates our perception of threat in faces

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This is kind of neat: Zhou and Chen collected gauze pads that had absorbed sweat from the armpit apocrine glands of men (because they sweat...

Men tolerate their peers better than women

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This study by Benenson et al. was conducted to examine the often-cited conclusion that human females are more sociable than males. Its resu...
1 comment:
Wednesday, February 18, 2009

When losing control can be useful.

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Apfelbaum and Sommers do a simple experiment that suggests that diminished executive control can facilitate positive outcomes in contentiou...
6 comments:

If it is difficult to pronounce, it must be risky.

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Song and Schwartz make the observation that low processing fluency (as with names that are difficult to pronounce) fosters the impression t...
2 comments:
Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Brain imaging can reflect expected, rather than actual, nerve activity

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Work by Sirotin and Das illustrates how the brain thinks ahead. Electrical signalling among brain cells summons the local delivery of extra...
3 comments:

Knowledge about how we know changes everything.

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The essay by Boroditsky in the Edge series has the following interesting comments: In the past ten years, research in cognitive science ha...
1 comment: