A new study using sophisticated brain scans shows how simple line drawings can capture the essence of a beach or a mountain for viewers just as well as a photograph would. Researchers found that viewing a "beach" scene depicted in a line drawing activated nearly the same patterns of brain activity in study participants as did viewing an actual color photograph of a beach. The same was true when people viewe ...

How useful would it be to anticipate how well someone will control their emotions? To predict how well they might be able to stay calm during stress? To accept critical feedback stoically? Heath A. Demaree, professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University, finds clues in what psychologists call "hot" and "cold" psychology. ...

Do our own prejudices and perceptions of people help defend our bodies against infectious disease? An article published in the April issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that our brains contain a sort of “behavioral immune system” that defends against disease even before disease-causing pathogens reach our bodies. ...

An older individual who cares for a spouse with dementia may be at an increased risk of developing cognitive problems because of the lifestyle that was shared with the spouse and because of the stress of caring for a loved one who is ill. These findings, which are published today in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, indicate that efforts are needed to help caregivers maintain their cognitive a ...

What does consciousness do? Theories vary, but most neurologists and cognitive psychologists agree that we need awareness for integration. That is, unconscious processing can take in one object or word at a time. But when it comes to pulling together disparate stimuli into a coherent, complex scene, consciousness gets to work. ...

Neuroscientists of the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin have now been able for the first time to document deliberate control of touch sensations in human working memory. It has been shown that the human brain can remember several touch sensations at the same time and consciously retrieve the touch if concentration is focused on these touches. This work is now published in the current issue of the presti ...

In the wild, mammals survive because they can see and evade predators lurking in the shadowy bushes. That ability translates to the human world. Transportation Security Administration screeners can pick out dangerous objects in an image of our messy and stuffed suitcases. We get out of the house every morning because we find our car keys on that cluttered shelf next to the door. ...

A new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows that the brain has built-in mechanisms that trigger an automatic reaction to someone who refuses to share. The reaction derives from the amygdala, an older part of the brain. The subjects' sense of justice was challenged in a two-player money-based fairness game, while their brain activity was registered by an magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. W ...

When a group of gamblers gather around a roulette table, individual players are likely to have different reasons for betting on certain numbers. Some may play a "lucky" number that has given them positive results in the past — a strategy called reinforcement learning. Others may check out the recent history of winning colors or numbers to try and decipher a pattern. Betting on the belief that a certain outc ...

At menopause, many women begin to notice a decline in their attention, organization, and short-term memory. These cognitive symptoms can lead to professional and personal challenges and unwarranted fears of early-onset dementia. A small study by Penn Medicine and Yale researchers, published in the journal Menopause, found that a drug typically given to children and adults with ADHD improved attention and co ...