Language, Thought and Cognition News  |
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Infants begin pulling off an amazing feat sometime in the final three months of their first year of life. They learn an important social interaction by following the gaze of an adult, a step that scientists believe gives babies a leg up on understanding language.
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We are constantly learning new things as we go about our lives. In addition to learning new facts, procedures, and concepts, we are also refining our sensory abilities. How and when these sensory modifications take place is the focus of intense study and debate. In new work, researchers at Boston University and the University of Montreal unify two lines of research--our understanding of classical learning and a phenomenon known as the attentional blink--to achieve an important demonstration that high-level mental processing is required even for subliminal learning.
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(Newark)-Psychology researchers have long understood and accepted the importance of an individual's brain activity in motor areas when interpreting the actions of others. However, much less was known about the role the body plays in helping individuals process and understand the same information. With the help of two patients suffering from an extremely rare degenerative neurological condition, a Rutgers-Newark Psychology Professor and his team of researchers have established that the body plays a significant role in helping humans to perceive and understand the actions of others.
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The theory that the mind works like a computer, in a series of distinct stages, was an important steppingstone in cognitive science, but it has outlived its usefulness, concludes a new Cornell University study. Instead, the mind should be thought of more as working the way biological organisms do: as a dynamic continuum, cascading through shades of grey.
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A recent study by researchers at the University of Alberta suggest that gestures may play an important role in producing language.
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Our conscious awareness is underpinned by activity in our brain, but there is far more going on in our brain at any one time than we can possibly be aware of. So what aspects of our brain's activity are we actually aware of? In a paper published recently in Current Biology, University of Sydney scientists Dr. Colin Clifford and Dr. Justin Harris investigated just how far visual signals from our eyes can penetrate into our brain's processing network without being consciously registered. They found that visual signals can actually travel farther under the radar of consciousness than many scientists had previously thought.
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Recent research shows that when thinking about the future, people believe they will have more time to do things than they do in the present. This leads to over-commitment because we are actually just as busy when the time comes as we are now, if not busier.
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Psychologists from McMaster University have discovered that the aging process improves certain abilities -- the ability to grasp the 'big picture'. The study, published in the journal Neuron dispels the myth that older people perform slower and worse than younger people.
"Going into the study, we knew that ageing changes the way people see the world," says Allison Sekuler, one senior author of the study. "But these results are an unusual twist on the standard 'ageing makes you worse' story, and they provide clear insight into what is changing in the ageing brain."
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They're the third type of mammal shown to have this skill
WASHINGTON -- Mammals other than humans can distinguish between different speech patterns. Neuroscientists in Barcelona report that rats, like humans (newborn and adult) and Tamarin monkeys, can extract regular patterns in language from speech (prosodic) cues. The report appears in the January issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, which is published by the American Psychological Association.
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The human brain's remarkable flexibility to understand a variety of signals as language extends to an unusual whistle language used by shepherds on one of the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa.
And the way the brain processes these whistles is similar to the way it goes about deciphering English, Spanish or other spoken languages, according to research being published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature.
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