Neuroscience
If your lover's singing is sometimes sexy and sometimes annoying, a change in hormones may be the reason.
A songbird study led by Donna Maney,assistant professor of psychology and a member of the Graduate Program in Neuroscience at Emory University, says it sheds new light on this issue, showing that a change in hormone levels may alter the way we perceive social cues by altering a system of brain nuclei, common to all vertebrates, called the "social behavior network."
Their research examines how genes, hormones and the environment interact to affect the brain, using songbirds as a model and…
Imagine you can never do the simplest memory orientation task, like finding your way home from the grocery store. In a world where most of us take our ability to do 'cognitive mapping' of our environment for granted, being lost all of the time like that can be terrifying.
Writing in Neuropsychologia, a study led by Giuseppe Iaria, a University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine and Vancouver Coastal Health Authority postdoctoral fellow, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) together with behavioral studies to assess and characterize the navigational deficiencies of a patient…
How you react physically to stimuli can have a great deal of impact on how you perceive the world and therefore how you vote, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL).
For example, people who react more strongly to bumps in the night, spiders on a human body or the sight of a shell-shocked victim are more likely to support public policies that emphasize protecting society over preserving individual privacy. The research results appear in the Sept. 19 issue of Science magazine.
The study tested 46 people who identified themselves as having…
The superior colliculus has long been thought of as a rapid orienting center of the brain that allows the eyes and head to turn swiftly either toward or away from the sights and sounds in our environment. Now a team of scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies has shown that the superior colliculus does more than send out motor control commands to eye and neck muscles.
Two complementary studies, both led by Richard Krauzlis, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Systems Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, have revealed that the superior colliculus performs supervisory…
When we hear somebody described as “frosty” or “cold”, we automatically picture a person who is unfriendly and antisocial. There are numerous examples in our daily language of metaphors which make a connection between cold temperatures and emotions such as loneliness, despair and sadness.
We are taught at a young age that metaphors are meant to be descriptive and are not supposed to be taken literally but recent studies suggest that these metaphors are more than just fancy literary devices and that there is a psychological basis for linking cold with feelings of social isolation.…
MIT neuroscientists have tricked the visual brain into confusing one object with another, demonstrating that time teaches us how to recognize objects. This discovery, they say, could lead to robots with actual 'recognition' ability.
It may sound strange, but human eyes never see the same image twice. An object such as a cat can produce innumerable impressions on the retina, depending on the direction of gaze, angle of view, distance and so forth. Every time our eyes move, the pattern of neural activity changes, yet our perception of the cat remains stable.
A possible explanation is suggested…
We all know that people can be influenced in complex ways by their peers. But two new studies in the September 11th issue of Current Biology reveal that the same can also be said of fruit flies.
The researchers found that group composition affects individual flies in several ways, including changes in gene activity and sexual behavior, all mediated by chemical communication.
"Many take for granted that communication among insects is hard-wired," said Joel Levine of the University of Toronto Mississauga. "We have observed that communication may be influenced by relationships even in insects…
Our brains contain their own navigation system much like satellite navigation ("sat-nav"), with in-built maps, grids and compasses, neuroscientist Dr Hugo Spiers told the BA Festival of Science at the University of Liverpool today. The brain's navigation mechanism resides in an area know as the hippocampus, which is responsible for learning and memory and famously shown to be different in London taxi drivers in a Wellcome Trust-funded study carried out by Professor Eleanor Maguire at UCL (University College London).
That's right, cabbies have better brains for GPS. The study showed that a…
The latest in a string of cancer genome sequencing papers is now online at Nature.
The Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network, a large consortuim of cancer researchers, has searched the genomes of 206 different brain cancer samples (all glioblastomas) for a variety of aberrations. They're looking for trends: by learning what mutations are common to all of these cancer samples, or what cellular processes are involved, we can come up with more rationally designed treatment strategies.
What's impressive is how quickly the scientific community has exploited new technologies and resources to do…
If you had a choice between receiving $1,000 right now or $4,000 ten years from now, which would you pick? Psychologists use the term “delay discounting” to describe our inability to resist the temptation of a smaller immediate reward in lieu of receiving a larger reward at a later date. Discounting future rewards too much is a form of impulsivity, and an important way in which we can neglect to exert self-control.
Previous research suggests that higher intelligence is related to better self-control, but the reasons for this link are unknown. Psychologists Noah A. Shamosh and Jeremy R. Gray…