Under time pressure, people tell us what we want to hear
When 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 moreLanguage Acquisition
People pay more attention to stimuli they associate with danger
A 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 moreHow do children express their state of knowledge of the world around them?
A 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 moreHow neuronal migration and outgrowth shape network architecture
Neurons 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's language skills may be harmed by social hardship
Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are three times more likely to develop difficulties with language than those from more affluent areas, research suggests.
Read moreNavigating 'Neuralville': Virtual town helps map brain functions
Experiments 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 moreWhy the language-ready brain is so complex
Scientists 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 moreMild-to-moderate hearing loss in children leads to changes in how brain processes sound
Deafness 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.
Read moreNeuroimaging reveals hidden communication between brain layers during reading
Language involves many different regions of the brain. Researchers have discovered previously hidden connections between brain layers during reading, in a neuroimaging study. The team used laminar Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (lfMRI) to investigate what happens when people read Dutch words like ''zalm'' (salmon) compared to pseudowords (''rorf''), revealing top-down influences on deep brain layers for the first time.
Read moreMechanisms of real-time speech interpretation in the human brain revealed
Scientists have come a step closer to understanding how we're able to understand spoken language so rapidly, and it involves a huge and complex set of computations in the brain.
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