Brain connectivity predicts reading skills

Nature News (October, 08, 2012)

The growth pattern of long-range connections in the brain predicts how a child’s reading skills will develop, according to research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Being Told Painting Is Fake Changes Brain's Response to Art

ScienceDaily (Dec. 20, 2011) 

Being told that a work of art is authentic or fake alters the brain's response to the visual content of artwork, Oxford University academics have found.

Fourteen participants were placed in a brain scanner and shown images of works by 'Rembrandt' -- some were genuine, others were convincing imitations painted by different artists. Neither the participants nor their brain signals could distinguish between genuine and fake paintings. However, advice about whether or not an artwork is authentic alters the brain's response; this advice is equally effective, regardless of whether the artwork is genuine or not.

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The chimpanzee who sees sounds

NATURE NEWS (December 05, 2011)

Chimpanzees meld sounds and colours, associating light objects with high tones and dark objects with deeper tones.

The finding hints that chimps, like humans, experience some form of synaesthesia, an uncommon condition in which the senses become intertwined, says Vera Ludwig, a cognitive neuroscientist at Charité Medical University in Berlin, Germany, who led a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Some synaesthetes associate different colours with letters and numbers, for instance, whereas others taste shapes.

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Evidence for the existence of a hypnotic state? Key may be in the glazed staring eyes, researchers suggest

ScienceDaily (Oct. 25, 2011)

A multidisciplinary group of researchers from Finland (University of Turku and Aalto University) and Sweden (University of Skövde) has found that the strange stare of patients under hypnosis may be a key that can eventually lead to a solution to a long debate about the existence of a hypnotic state.

One of the most widely known features of a hypnotized person in the popular culture is a glazed, wide-open look in the eyes. Paradoxically, this sign has not been considered to have any major importance among researchers and has never been studied in any detail, probably due to the fact that it can be seen in only some hypnotized people.

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DBS studies show how brain buys time for tough choices

EurekAlert! (Sep. 25, 2011)

When people must decide between arguably equal choices, they need time to deliberate. In the case of people undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson's disease, that process sometimes doesn't kick in, leading to impulsive behavior. New research into why that happens has led scientists to a detailed explanation of how the brain devotes time to reflect on tough choices.

Michael Frank, professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University, studied the impulsive behavior of Parkinson's patients when he was at the University of Arizona several years ago. His goal was to model the brain's decision-making mechanics. He had begun working with Parkinson's patients because DBS, a treatment that suppresses their tremor symptoms, delivers pulses of electrical current to the subthalamic nucleus (STN), a part of the brain that Frank hypothesized had an important role in decisions. Could the STN be what slams the brakes on impulses, giving the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) time to think?


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Improvements are needed for accuracy in gene-by-environment interaction studies, experts say

ScienceDaily (Sep. 11, 2011)

A new study from McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School and the University of Colorado concludes that genetic research drawing correlations between specific genes, environmental variables and the combined impact they have on the development of some psychiatric illnesses needs additional scrutiny and replication before being accepted as true.

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Scientists probe connection between sight and touch in the brain

ScienceDaily (Sep. 9, 2011)

Shakespeare famously referred to "the mind's eye," but scientists at USC now also have identified a "mind's touch."

USC scientists have discovered that as you look at an object, your brain not only processes what the object looks like, but remembers what it feels like to touch it as well. This connection is so strong that a computer examining data coming only from the part of your brain that processes touch can predict which object at which you are actually looking.

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Direct ancestor of Homo genus? Fossils show human-like hand, brain and pelvis in early hominin

ScienceDaily (Sep. 7, 2011)

The Australopithecus sediba discovered in 2008 could be the direct ancestor of the Homo genus. That is the conclusion of a team from the University of Witwatersrand, with participation by anthropologist Peter Schmid of the University of Zurich. The researchers describe in five publications in "Science" why their finding is more likely to come into consideration than earlier discoveries, like Homo habilis.

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Perceiving an object and its context in different cultures: A cultural look at new look

Shinobu Kitayama, Sean Duffy, Tadashi Kawamura, and Jeff T. Larsen

Psychological Science 14:210-206 (2003)

In two studies, a newly devised test (framed-line test) was used to examine the hypothesis that individuals in Asian cultures are more capable of incorporating contextual information and those engaging in North American cultures are more capable of ignoring contextual information. On each trials, participants were presented with a square frame, within which was printed a vertical line. Participants were then shown another square frame of the same or different size and asked to draw a line that was identical to the first line in either absolute length (absolute task) or proportion to the height of the surrounding frame (relative task). The results supported the hypothesis: Whereas Japanese were more accurate in the relative task, Americans were more accurate in the absolute task. Moreover, when engaging in another culture, individuals tended to show the cognitive characteristic common in the host culture.

Culture shapes how we look at faces

Caroline Blais, Rachael E. Jack, Christoph Scheepers, Daniel Fiset, Roberto Caldara

POLS One 3(8):e3022

Face processing, among many basic visual skills, is thought to be invariant across humans. From as early as 1965, studies of eye movements have consistently revealed a systematic triangular sequence of fixation over the eyes and the mouth, suggesting that faces elicit a universal, biologically-determined information extraction pattern. Here we monitored the eye movements of Western Caucasian and East Asian observers while they learned, recognized, and categorized by race Western Caucasian and East Asian faces. Western Caucasian observers reproduced a scattered triangular pattern of fixations for faces and both races and across tasks. Contrary to intuition, East Asian observed focused more on the central region of the faces. These results demonstrate that face processing can no longer be considered as arising from a universal series of perceptual events. The strategy employed to extract visual information from faces differs across cultures.