Cognitive Science Blog

USA Today reports:

[A] woman described in the journal Neuropsychologia has an especially severe, lifelong history of getting lost. She, like Roseman, can get to work along a long-practiced path — but sometimes gets lost walking home from her bus stop, say researcher Giuseppe Iaria and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver General Hospital. She goes nowhere else alone. At 43, she lives with her father, does not drive and “does not have a nice social life,” Iaria says.

In a series of tests, the researchers found that the woman has an inability to create mental maps of the environment. When shown a simple virtual neighborhood on a computer, she can eventually learn a route — but what takes typical people one to five minutes takes her more than half an hour.

The root of her difficulties, Iaria says, most likely lies in a part of the brain called the hippocampus…

USA Today reports:

Researchers have long known that watching violence on TV or in movies ratchets up aggression, but what about watching people being mean to one another? Could watching Mean Girls make you as aggressive as watching Kill Bill?

A new study suggests the answer is yes.

Science Daily reports on new developments in fMRI technology that may lead to higher resolution scans.

The Washington Post reports that

Pressured by desperate parents, government researchers are pushing to test an unproven treatment on autistic children, a move some scientists see as an unethical experiment in voodoo medicine.

The treatment removes heavy metals from the body and is based on the fringe theory that mercury in vaccines triggers autism _ a theory never proved and rejected by mainstream science. Mercury hasn’t been in childhood vaccines since 2001, except for certain flu shots.