Social Sciences
A friend of mine has started to wonder how to find scientists he will feel comfortable working with. For the past year, he has been working in a lab in a very prestigious institution. He wrote me about it:
The director of my lab is a very successful scientist. She is also director of the research facility. Our personalities blended well initially, but then we grew apart. She is very nice, very busy, and impressively ambitious. Despite her genuine desire to be nice, honest, and good teacher, her ambition is supreme — above honesty and integrity from my point of view.
My biggest issue has been…
A primary mystery puzzling neuroscientists -- where in the brain lies intelligence" -- just may have a unified answer.
In a review of 37 imaging studies related to intelligence, including their own, Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine and Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico have uncovered evidence of a distinct neurobiology of human intelligence. Their Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT) identifies a brain network related to intelligence, one that primarily involves areas in the frontal and the parietal lobes.
Their report includes peer commentary from 19…
Scientists at Johns Hopkins have developed a mouse model for schizophrenia in which a mutated gene linked to schizophrenia can be turned on or off at will.
The researchers developed the transgenic mouse by inserting the gene for mutant Disrupted-In-Schizophrenia-1 (DISC-1) into a normal mouse, along with a promoter that enables the gene to be switched on or off. Mutant DISC-1 was previously identified in a Scottish family with a strong history of schizophrenia and related mental disorders.
The study was performed in the laboratory of Mikhail Pletnikov, M.D., Ph.D., in the Department of…
Autism spectrum disorders cover a wide span of conditions and symptoms, from severe mental retardation to mild social impairment. In general, people with autism have problems with social interactions, such as maintaining eye contact or reading body language. They may also exhibit stereotypical behavior, such as being obsessed with lining up objects. In the movie “Rain Man,” the title character was unable to form social bonds and became distressed when his normal routine was disrupted, yet he could perform exceptional mental mathematics.
About 1.5 million people in the United States have…
In experiments with mice, Lennart Mucke and colleagues have discovered a mechanism by which the toxic brain protein produced in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) could contribute to the cognitive deficits that are its hallmark. They found evidence that the toxic protein, called Aβ peptide, triggers overexcitation of neurons in the brain’s learning centers, inducing compensatory rewiring of brain circuitry in the centers—all of which could cause deterioration of neural function.
The researcher wrote that their results showed the need for studies to explore whether blocking that overexcitation might…
Apes bite and try to break a tube to retrieve the food inside while children follow the experimenter's example to get inside the tube to retrieve the prize, showing that even before preschool, toddlers are more sophisticated in their social learning skills than their closest primate relatives, according to a new report.
This innate proficiency allows them to excel in both physical and social skills as they begin school and progress through life.
"We compared three species to determine which abilities and skills are distinctly human," explained Esther Herrmann of the Max Planck Institute for…
ADHD is characterized by hyperactivity, impulsive behavior and an inability to pay attention to tasks; the condition affects social behaviors and achievement at school and work.
A new study says an estimated 8.7 percent of U.S. children age 8 to 15 meet the diagnostic criteria for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Less than half of that are being treated for it.
Is ADHD really on the rise or are the criteria too broad? It depends on who you ask because it doesn't follow any particular medical pattern. Boys have it more than girls and hispanics less than whites. The poorest…
Voyage to the bottom of the sea, or simply look along the bottom of a clear stream and you may spy lobsters or crayfish waving their antennae. Look closer, and you will see them feeling around with their legs and flicking their antennules – the small, paired sets of miniature feelers at the top of their heads between the long antennae.
Both are used for sensing the environment. The long antennae are used for getting a physical feel of an area, such as the contours of a crevice. The smaller antennules are there to both help the creature smell for food or mates or dangerous predators and also…
A new article published in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that infants fine-tune their visual and auditory systems to stimuli during the first year of life, essentially “weeding out” unnecessary discriminatory abilities.
Lisa Scott, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and her colleagues examined several studies suggesting that infants begin to hone their perceptual discrimination to environmentally relevant distinctions by 9-12 months of age. At the same time, the…
Research by the University at Albany shows that information conveyed by a kiss can have profound consequences for romantic relationships, and can even be a major factor in ending one.
In a recently published article, Susan M. Hughes, Marissa A. Harrison, and Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. reveal that many college students have found themselves attracted to someone, only to discover after they kissed them for the first time that they were no longer interested.
"In other words," said Gallup, an evolutionary psychologist, "While many forces lead two people to connect romantically, the kiss,…