Internet use can “boost” brain function

Science Daily reports:

UCLA scientists… found that middle-aged and older adults with little Internet experience were able to trigger key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning after just one week of surfing the Web.

The findings, presented Oct. 19 at the 2009 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, suggest that Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults.

Statistical literacy influences one’s understanding of weather forecasts

I’ve long been interested in the phenomenon of statistical literacy – that is, the ability understand (or misunderstand) statistical information, especially information dealing with probability.

This USA Today article illustrates this phenomenon:

When your local weather forecaster announces that there is a 30% chance of rain tomorrow, not everyone knows what that means.

Some think it means 30% of an area will get rain. Others think it will rain for 30% of the day. In fact, of all the forecast terms used by meteorologists, this remains one of the most baffling to the public.

Some people don’t understand that the forecaster simply means there’s a 30% probability it will rain at some point during the day. Susan Joslyn, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at theUniversity of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues have been studying such confusion.

More information on statisical literacy can be found here.

Are ‘neuro-enhancing’ drugs coming to a campus near you?

NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross reports:

In the modern world of busy schedules and busier lives, some people are turning to “neuro-enhancing” drugs to gain a competitive edge.

As journalist Margaret Talbot writes in the April 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine, a variety of students, professors and business people are taking drugs intended for attention deficit disorder, narcolepsy and epilepsy in an effort to enhance brain function and get ahead.

Talbot’s New Yorker article is available online here.

New study probes relationship between poverty, life stress, and intelligence

USA Today reports:

“Family income is a strong and consistent predictor,” of test scores, school grades and education, say a Cornell University study in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. “The longer the childhood exposure to poverty, the worse the achievement levels become.”

Although a “large, robust literature” stretching back more than a decade describes this observation, study authors Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg note there is no biological explanation for it. Why does poverty have this effect?

To find an answer, the pair looked at 195 men who were part of a long-term study of rural poverty. The study included health records and income. In 2006, about 22% of all children nationwide lived below the poverty line, living on less than $21,200 for a family of four, according to the federal Department of Health and Human Services. (About 18% of people worldwide live below the international poverty line of $1 a day, according to Princeton economist Alan Krueger.)

“The proportion of early childhood spent in poverty is also significantly related to working memory,” finds the study, perhaps not surprising. But when the researchers went back and looked at the men’s health records, the relationship between poverty and memory dissolved, revealing their health — as reflected in blood pressure, obesity and stress hormone measures — are factored in. What looks like an income effect is actually a public health problem.

The Evans & Schamberg report can be accessed here.

Social networking sites harm children’s brains, scientist claims

The Daily Mail reports:

Social networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users, an eminent scientist has warned.

Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are said to shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centred.

The claims from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield will make disturbing reading for the millions whose social lives depend on logging on to their favourite websites each day.

But they will strike a chord with parents and teachers who complain that many youngsters lack the ability to communicate or concentrate away from their screens.

New findings on humans’ innate mathematical abilities

Note:  this update is cross-posted with EducBlog.com, my education news and research blog.

Click here to read the full update on new findings into humans’ number sense and the links between number sense and math learning.

Artificial intelligence allows helicopters to fly themselves

Science Daily reports:

Stanford computer scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system that enables robotic helicopters to teach themselves to fly difficult stunts by watching other helicopters perform the same maneuvers.

The result is an autonomous helicopter than can perform a complete airshow of complex tricks on its own.

The stunts are “by far the most difficult aerobatic maneuvers flown by any computer controlled helicopter,” said Andrew Ng, the professor directing the research of graduate students Pieter Abbeel, Adam Coates, Timothy Hunter and Morgan Quigley.

The dazzling airshow is an important demonstration of “apprenticeship learning,” in which robots learn by observing an expert, rather than by having software engineers peck away at their keyboards in an attempt to write instructions from scratch.

The influence of Theories of Mind on metacognition

From Science Daily:

Metacognition refers to the awareness of one’s knowledge in different areas. The more comprehensive and accurate this metacognitive knowledge, the better one is able to reflect about his or her own actions and behaviors. “Theory of Mind” (ToM) deals with very young children’s understanding of mental life and the ability to estimate mental states.

A new study in the journal Mind, Brain, and Education detects a systematic link between children’s “theory of mind” as assessed in kindergarten and their metacognitive knowledge in elementary school.

Wolfgang Schneider, Ph.D., of the University of Wurzburg examined 174 children who were either three or four years of age at the beginning of the study in order to investigate the relationship between early ToM and subsequent metacognitive development. Children were tested at four measurement points, separated by a testing interval of approximately half a year.

Language abilities assessed at the ages of three or four years made significant contributions to the prediction of metamemory scores at the age of five. ToM facilitated the acquisition of metacognitive knowledge. Early ToM competencies also affected the acquisition of metacognitive vocabulary, which in turn had an impact on developmental changes in metacognitive knowledge.

ToM development is characterized by a growing insight into inferential and interpretive mental processes. Declarative metacognitive knowledge is usually scarce in young elementary children but increases considerably over the school years, predicting academic performance.

“An important reason to study metacognitive monitoring processes is because monitoring is supposed to play a central role in directing how people study,” Schneider notes. “Our research affects issues of cognitive intellectual development and can be used to develop training programs, particularly for young children, to ensure adequate metacognitive processing in educational contexts.”

“Viral” yawning?

The LA Times reports on research from the UK on yawning:

A study published in the journal Biology Letters this week found that human yawns are contagious to dogs, a sign that man’s best friend may be capable of a rudimentary form of empathy.

To scientists, dogs have been a bit of a puzzle. Dogs are adept at reading human intentions and excel over other animals in picking up human hand gestures and other behavioral cues. At the same time, though, they appear to lack a sense of self, considered a prerequisite for understanding the feelings of others.

Unlike chimpanzees and possibly elephants and dolphins, dogs do not recognize themselves in a mirror, a classic test of self-awareness.

The latest study demonstrates that dogs are not completely egocentric in their relationships with humans but possess “some low-level attending to what others feel,” said Duke University anthropologist Brian Hare, who was not involved in the research.

“What’s fascinating about this study is that you would not expect to find contagious yawning where you did not have self-awareness,” he said.

Only humans and chimps are known to contagiously yawn.

Human brains interacting with machine brains

Science Daily reports on research by German researchers:

Almost daily, new accomplishments in the field of human robotics are presented in the media. Constructions of increasingly elaborate and versatile humanoid robots are reported and thus human-robot interactions accumulate in daily life. However, the question of how humans perceive these “machines” and attribute capabilities and “mental qualities” to them remains largely undiscovered.

In the fMRI study, reported in PLoS ONE, Krach and colleagues investigated how the increase of human-likeness of interaction partners modulates the participants’ brain activity. In this study, participants were playing an easy computer game (the prisoners’ dilemma game) against four different game partners: a regular computer notebook, a functionally designed Lego-robot, the anthropomorphic robot BARTHOC Jr. and a human. All game partners played an absolutely similar sequence, which was not, however, revealed to the participants.

The results clearly demonstrated that neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex as well as in the right temporo-parietal junction linearly increased with the degree of “human-likeness” of interaction partners, i.e. the more the respective game partners exhibited human-like features, the more the participants engaged cortical regions associated with mental state attribution/mentalizing.