Clipmarks | Silkweaver's 'cognition' clips

Learning From Mistakes Only Works After Age 12, Study Suggests

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 20:41:56 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Is that difference between eight- and twelve-year-olds the result of experience, or does it have to do with the way the brain develops? As yet, nobody has the answer. 'This kind of brain research has only been possible for the last ten years or so,' says Crone, 'and there are a lot more questions which have to be answered. But it is probably a combination of the brain maturing and experience.'

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback ('Well done!'), whereas negative feedback ('Got it wrong this time') scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring. Twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes. Adults do the same, but more efficiently.

The switch in learning strategy has been demonstrated in behavioural research, which shows that eight-year-olds respond disproportionately inaccurately to negative feedback. But the switch can also be seen in the brain, as developmental psychologist Dr Eveline Crone and her colleagues from the Leiden Brain and Cognition Lab discovered using fMRI research.

Children learn the whole time, so this new knowledge can have major consequences for people wanting to teach children: how can you best relay instructions to eight- and twelve-year-olds?' ’

Tags: brain, developement, learning

Scientists Say We Can See Sound

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:08:33 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Recordings from 49 neurons responsible for the earliest stages of visual processing, researchers found activation that mirrored the behavior.

That is, when the sound was played, the neurons reacted as if there had been a stronger light, at a speed that can only be explained by a direct connection between the ear and eye brain regions, said researcher Ye Wang of the University of Texas in Houston.

The study presents the first evidence that a sensory cell can process an alternative sensation, said head researcher Pascal Barone of the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France, who discovered a contender for the anatomical connection in 2002.

Clip Source: www.foxnews.com

Turning conventional neuroscience on its head, new research suggests the human visual system processes sound and helps us see.

Here's the basics of what was Neuroscience 101: The auditory system records sound, while the visual system focuses, well, on the visuals, and never do they meet.

Instead, a "higher cognitive" producer, like the brain's superior colliculus, uses these separate inputs to create our cinematic experiences.

The textbook rewrite: The brain can, if it must, directly use sound to see and light to hear.

Researchers trained monkeys to locate a light flashed on a screen. When the light was very bright, they easily found it; when it was dim, it took a long time.

But if a dim light made a brief sound, the monkeys found it in no time — too quickly, in fact, than can be explained by the old theories.

Tags: brain, neuroscience, cognition

Cooking and Cognition: How Humans Got So Smart

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:55:09 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion.

To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, Khaitovich and colleagues examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism.

The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, said Khaitovich, carefully adding that definitive claims of causation are premature.

The research is detailed in the August 2008 issue of Genome Biology.

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

After two tremendous growth spurts — one in size, followed by an even more important one in cognitive ability — the human brain is now a lot like a teenage boy.

It consumes huge amounts of calories, is rather temperamental and, when harnessed just right, exhibits incredible prowess.

The brain's roaring metabolism, possibly stimulated by early man's invention of cooking, may be the main factor behind our most critical cognitive leap, new research suggests.

About 2 million years ago, the human brain rapidly increased its mass until it was double the size of other primate brains.

"This happened because we started to eat better food, like eating more meat," said researcher Philipp Khaitovich

For a long time, we were pretty dumb. Humans did little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," he said. Then, only about 150,000 years ago, a different type of spurt happened — our big brains suddenly got smart.

Tags: brain, culture, intelligence, nutrition

No gender differences in math performance

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:51:03 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver

Clip Source: www.brainmysteries.com

We've all heard it. Many of us in fact believe it. Girls just aren't as good at math as boys.

But is it true? After sifting through mountains of data - including SAT results and math scores from 7 million students who were tested in accordance with the No Child Left Behind Act - a team of scientists says the answer is no.

Whether they looked at average performance, the scores of the most gifted children or students' ability to solve complex math problems, girls measured up to boys.

There just aren't gender differences anymore in math performance

Though girls take just as many advanced high school math courses today as boys, and women earn 48 percent of all mathematics bachelor's degrees, the stereotype persists that girls struggle with math

Cultural beliefs like this are "incredibly influential," she says, making it critical to question them. "Because if your mom or your teacher thinks you can't do math, that can have a big impact on your math self concept

Tags: gender, math, cognition

All on the mind - The Future of Cognitive Enhancers

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:15:00 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: This is a short article in the current issue of the Economist. Another sign that cognitive enhancers are gaining public interest and legitimacy.

Clip Source: www.economist.com

FOR thousands of years, people have sought substances that they hoped would boost their mental powers and their stamina.

Leaves, roots and fruit have been chewed, brewed and smoked in a quest to expand the mind.

That search continues today, with the difference only that the shamans work in pharmaceutical laboratories rather than forests.

Such drugs are known as cognition enhancers.

They work on the neural processes that underlie such mental activities as attention, perception, learning, memory, language, planning and decision-making, usually by altering the balance of the chemical neurotransmitters involved in these processes.

a large number of such brain-affecting drugs are likely to emerge over the next few decades.

Provigil and Ritalin really do enhance cognition in healthy people.

It also improves people's performance in tests of their ability to plan.

Mind-expansion may soon, therefore, become big business.

Prepare for drugs that will improve memory, concentration and learning

Tags: brain, cognition, gognitive enhancement

Language Without Numbers: Amazonian Tribe Has No Word To Express 'One,' Other Numbers

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:36:06 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: However, the MIT team decided to add a new twist--they started with 10 objects and asked the tribe members to count down. In that experiment, the tribe members used the word previously thought to mean "two" when as many as five or six objects were present, and they used the word for "one" for any quantity between one and four.

This indicates that "these aren't counting numbers at all," said Gibson. "They're signifying relative quantities."

He said this type of counting strategy has never been observed before, although it may also be found in other languages believed to have "one," "two," and "many" counting words.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

An Amazonian language with only 300 speakers has no word to express the concept of "one" or any other specific number, according to a new study from an MIT-led team.

The team, led by MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the Piraha tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express relative quantities such as "some" and "more," but not precise numbers.

It is often assumed that counting is an innate part of human cognition, said Gibson, "but here is a group that does not count. They could learn, but it's not useful in their culture, so they've never picked it up."

The study, which appeared in the June 10 online edition of the journal Cognition, offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, Gibson said.

Tags: language, counting, numbers

Why We're All Moral Hypocrites

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:59:09 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: The researchers then "constrained cognition" by asking subjects to memorize long strings of numbers. In this greatly distracted state, subjects became impartial. They thought their own transgressions were just as terrible as those of others.

This suggests that we are intuitively moral beings, but "when we are given time to think about it, we construct arguments about why what we did wasn’t that bad,"

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Most of us, whether we admit it or not, are moral hypocrites. We judge others more severely than we judge ourselves.

Mounting evidence suggests moral decisions result from the jousting between our knee-jerk responses (think "survival instinct") and our slower, but more collected evaluations. Which is more responsible for our self-leniency?

a recent study presented people with two tasks.

One was described as tedious and time-consuming

the other, easy and brief.

The subjects were asked to assign each task to either themselves or the next participant.

They could do this independently or defer to a computer, which would assign the tasks randomly.

Eighty-five percent of 42 subjects passed up the computer’s objectivity and assigned themselves the short task – leaving the laborious one to someone else.

Furthermore, they thought their decision was fair

However, when 43 other subjects watched strangers make the same decision, they thought it unjust.

Tags: behavior, morality, psychology

How the brain detects the emotions of others

Fri, 16 May 2008 10:38:38 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

People who are good at interpreting facial expressions have "mirror neuron" systems that are more active, say researchers. The finding adds weight to the idea that these cells are crucial to helping us figure out how others are feeling.

Mirror neurons are brain cells that fire both when you do something and when you watch someone else do the same thing.

Because they allow us to mimic what others are doing, it is thought that these neurons may be responsible for why we can feel empathy, or understand others' intentions and states of mind.

Now Peter Enticott at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues have found evidence supporting this theory.

volunteers who were better at judging people's emotions had higher mirror neuron activity in the thumb task. There was no correlation, however, between the ability to recognise faces and mirror neuron activity. This suggests that mirror neurons are involved in understanding emotions as well as in the mimicry of actions.

Tags: neuroscience, mirror neurons, cognition

Letter from Utopia

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:23:57 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver

Clip Source: www.nickbostrom.com

Dear Human,

Greetings, and may this letter find you at peace and in prosperity! Forgive my writing to you out of the blue. Though you and I have never met, we are not strangers. We are, in a certain sense, the closest of kin…

I am one of your possible futures. One day, I hope, you will become me. Should fortune grant this wish, then I am not just a possible future of yours, but your actual future: a coming phase of you, like the full moon that follows a waxing crescent, or like the flower that follows a seed. I am writing to tell you about my life – how marvelous it is – that you may choose it for yourself.

The First Transformation: Secure life!

The Second Transformation: Upgrade cognition!

The Third Transformation: Elevate well-being!

How do you find this place? How long will it take to get here?

I can pass you no blueprint for Utopia, no timetable, no roadmap. All I can give you is my assurance that there is something here, the potential for a better life.

Tags: utopia

Human Evolution & Intelligence StudiesTrending Away From Reductionism

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:58:35 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver

Clip Source: memebox.com

How strong are your genes? How smart are you? People have traditionally estimated answers to these questions based on genetic surveys and IQ Tests, which can provide valuable answers, but stop well short of factoring in the system(s) surrounding us.

Right now, we may be on the verge of a perspective shift that will help us to fill in a few more gaps and better our systems definitions. Both human intelligence and evolutionary studies appear poised for a due emphasis shift from reductionism (the focus on individual human agents and single brains) to a more holistic (the focus on large groups and the surrounding bio/info/tech structures) approach.

a new model, which demonstrates that environmental factors play a much larger role in the evolution of cognition than previously thought.

“industrialization’s rising cognitive demands

could in fact be the kind of widespread

changing environmental factor that could account for the higher IQ scores across so many nations.” (cont.)

Tags: evolution, human intelligence, cognitive development

Blind to Change, Even as It Stares Us in the Face

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:42:32 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver

Clip Source: www.kurzweilai.net

The results of change blindness studies and other experiments strongly suggest that the visual system can focus on only one or very few objects at a time (maybe 30 or 40 objects per second), and that anything lying outside a given moment's cone of interest gets short shrift.

This is because the brain has evolved mechanisms for combating data overload, allowing large rivers of data to pass along optical and cortical corridors almost entirely unassimilated. It peels off selected data for a close, careful view, filling gaps and compiling a cohesive portrait of reality based on a flickering view.

Tags: brain, cognition, peception

Trust your instinct

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 13:03:11 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Interesting

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

A UCL (University College London) study has found that you are more likely to perform well if you do not think too hard and instead trust your instincts. The research, published online today in the journal Current Biology, shows that, in some cases, instinctive snap decisions are more reliable than decisions taken using higher-level cognitive processes.

Participants, who were asked to pick the odd one out on a screen covered in over 650 identical symbols, including one rotated version of the same symbol, actually performed better when they were given no time at all to linger on the symbols and so were forced to rely entirely on their subconscious.

Dr Li Zhaoping, of the UCL Department of Psychology, said: "This finding seems counter-intuitive. You would expect people to make more accurate decisions when given the time to look properly. Instead they performed better when given almost no time to think. The conscious or top-level function of the brain, when active, vetoes our initial subconscious decision – even when it is correct – leaving us unaware or distrustful of our instincts and at an immediate disadvantage. Falling back on our inbuilt, involuntary subconscious processes for certain tasks is actually more effective than using our higher-level cognitive functions."

The study shows an instance when our rational mind is more likely to perform worse than our subconscious – but the conscious mind still tends to veto the subconscious.

Ten participants were asked to locate the only back to front version of a repeated symbol on screen and were given between zero and 1.5 seconds from the moment their eyes had landed on the odd one out to scrutinize the image. Participants had to decide whether the odd one out was on the left or the right-hand side of the screen. The researchers found that participants scored better if they were given no scrutinizing time at all.

Tags: science, biology, psychology, cognition