How blind and deaf people approach a cognitive test regarded as a milestone in human development has provided clues to how we deduce what others are thinking.
Full article: New Scientist
If you want to get someone to do something, ask them in their right ear, say scientists. Italian researchers found people were better at processing information when requests were made on that side in three separate tests.
Full article: BBC News
If I was reading this sentence aloud, your brain would be able to interpret whether I was speaking in anger, joy, relief, or sadness. That’s because emotions in speech leave distinct “signatures” in the brain of the listener. Now, for the first time, brain scans have now characterised those patterns. The finding could help determine where in the brain deficits in emotion processing occur in people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.
Full article: New Scientist
Neuroscientists feel they are much closer to an accepted unified theory about how the brain processes speech and language, according to a scientist at Georgetown University Medical Center who first laid the concepts a decade ago and who has now published a review article confirming the theory.
Full article: EurekAlert
We are all capable of “hearing” shapes and sizes and perhaps even “tasting” sounds, according to researchers.
Full article: BBC News
Neuroscience textbooks typically portray the five senses as separate entities, but in the real world the senses frequently interact, as anyone who has tried to enjoy dinner with a stuffy nose can attest. Hearing and vision seem similarly connected, the most famous example being the “McGurk effect,” where visual cues, such as moving lips, affect how people hear speech. And now new research shows that touch can influence speech perception, too.
Full article: Scientific American
If I was reading this sentence aloud, your brain would be able to interpret whether I was speaking in anger, joy, relief, or sadness. That’s because emotions in speech leave distinct “signatures” in the brain of the listener.
Now, for the first time, brain scans have now characterised those patterns. The finding could help determine where in the brain deficits in emotion processing occur in people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.
Full article: New Scientist
Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have found that an area known to be important for reading in the left visual cortex contains neurons that are specialized to process written words as whole word units. Although some theories of reading as well as neuropsychological and experimental data have argued for the existence of a neural representation for whole written real words (an “orthographic lexicon”), evidence for this has been elusive.
Full article: EurekAlert
A new study provides direct experimental evidence that a brain region important for reading and word recognition contains neurons that are highly selective for individual real words. The research, published by Cell Press in the April 30th issue of the journal Neuron, provides important insight into brain mechanisms associated with reading and may lead to a better understanding of reading disabilities.
Full article: EurekAlert
Forming a grammatically correct sentence may seem to require advanced cognitive skills, but it turns out that our creative language capacity might rely on a less sophisticated system than is commonly thought. A recent study suggests that our ability to construct sentences may arise from procedural memory—the same simple memory system that lets our dogs learn to sit on command.
Full article: Scientific American
Through a study carried out at the Universities of La Laguna and Valencia, it has been verified that the brain distinguishes between vowels and consonants. Neuronal mechanisms change when they are processed and, when it comes to lexical access; both have a different status in our mind, thus contributing differently to this basic process of visual word recognition.
Full article: AlphaGalileo
A University of Pennsylvania psychology study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to scan the brain, reveals that people who consider themselves visual learners, as opposed to verbal learners, have a tendency to convert linguistically presented information into a visual mental representation. The more strongly an individual identified with the visual cognitive style, the more that individual activated the visual cortex when reading words.
Full article: EurekAlert
In a new report in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Jos J.A. Van Berkum from the Max Planck Institute in The Netherlands describes recent experiments using brain waves to understand how we are able to make sense of sentences.
Full article: Science Mode
When someone speaks to you, do you see what they are saying? We tend to think of speech as being something we hear, but recent studies suggest that we use a variety of senses for speech perception - that the brain treats speech as something we hear, see and even feel. In a new report in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum describes research examining how our different senses blend together to help us perceive speech.
Full article: EurekAlert
Every day we are confronted with positive and negative statements. By combining the new, incoming information with what we already know, we are usually able to figure out if the statement is true or false. Previous research has suggested that including negative words, such as “not,” in the middle of a sentence can throw off our brains and make it more difficult to understand.
Full article: EurekAlert
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