Babies seek to understand the world around them and learn many new things every day. Unexpected events — for example when a ball falls through a table — provide researchers with the unique opportunity to understand infants' learning processes. What happens in their brains as they learn and integrate new information?
Read moreUsing innovative new methods researchers have built a new index that uses data from books and newspaper to track levels of national happiness from 1820. Their research could help governments to make better decisions about policy priorities.
Read moreWhen asked to answer questions quickly and impulsively, people tend to respond with a socially desirable answer rather than an honest one, a set of experiments shows.
Read moreA new analysis of how people prioritize their attention when determining safety and danger in busy settings, such as crossing a road, suggests that a person will pay more attention to something if they learn it is associated with danger.
Read moreA study reveals for the first time that three-year-olds use gestural and prosodic precursors in the expression of uncertainty, which they will express after five years of age through lexical cues.
Read moreNeurons are not randomly arranged in the human brain. In the cortex, they are organized in interconnected clusters with high intrinsic connectivity. This modular connectivity structure, in which clusters eventually serve as functional units, is formed in early phases of development. The underlying self-organization process is regulated by neuronal activity but the detailed mechanisms are still poorly understood. Based on in vitro studies and computational modeling, neuroscientists have now made an important contribution to the understanding of brain networks and their development: in their current study, they show how neuronal outgrowth and migration interact in shaping network architecture and the degree of modularity in mature networks.
Read moreChildren from disadvantaged backgrounds are three times more likely to develop difficulties with language than those from more affluent areas, research suggests.
Read moreExperiments showed that the brain's parahippocampal place area is involved in recognizing a particular kind of place, while the brain's retrosplenial complex is involved in mentally mapping the locations of particular places.
Read moreScientists argue for a new model of language, involving the interaction of multiple brain networks. This model is much more complex than the classical neurobiological model of language, which was largely based on single-word processing.
Read moreDeafness in early childhood is known to lead to lasting changes in how sounds are processed in the brain, but new research published today shows that even mild-to-moderate levels of hearing loss in young children can lead to similar changes.
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