Bruce Bower Many preschoolers take a surprisingly long and bumpy mental path to the realization that people can have mistaken beliefs — say, thinking that a ball is in a basket when it has secretly been moved to a toy box. Traditional learning curves, in which kids gradually move from knowing nothing to complete understanding, don’t apply to this landmark social achievement and probably to many other types of learning, a new study concludes. Kids ranging in age from 3 to 5 often go back and forth between passing and failing false-belief tests for several months to more than one year, say psychologist Sara Baker of the University of Cambridge and her colleagues. A small minority of youngsters jump quickly from always failing to always passing these tests, the scientists report October 20 in Cognitive Psychology. “If these results are replicated, it will surprise a lot of researchers that there is such a low level of sudden insight into false beliefs,” says psychologist Malinda Carpenter, currently at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Early childhood researchers generally assume that preschoolers either pass or fail false-belief tests, with a brief transition between the two, explains Carpenter, who did not participate in the new study. Grasping that others sometimes have mistaken beliefs is a key step in social thinking. False-belief understanding may start out as something that can be indicated nonverbally but not described. Human 2-year-olds and even chimpanzees tend to look toward spots where a person would expect to find a hidden item that only the children or apes have seen moved elsewhere (SN Online: 10/6/16). © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22816 - Posted: 11.01.2016

By GINA KOLATA Americans believe that obesity is the biggest health threat in the nation today — bigger even than cancer. But though scientific research shows that diet and exercise are insufficient solutions, a large majority say fat people should be able to summon the willpower to lose weight on their own. The findings are from a nationally representative survey of 1,509 adults released on Tuesday by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, an independent research institution. The study, funded by the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, found that concerns about obesity have risen. Just a few years ago, in a more limited survey, cancer was seen as the most serious health threat. The lead researcher, Jennifer Benz of the survey group at the University of Chicago, said that to her knowledge no other survey has provided so comprehensive a view of Americans’ beliefs about obesity, including how to treat it, whether people are personally responsible for it and whether it is a disease. Researchers say obesity, which affects one-third of Americans, is caused by interactions between the environment and genetics and has little to do with sloth or gluttony. There are hundreds of genes that can predispose to obesity in an environment where food is cheap and portions are abundant. Yet three-quarters of survey participants said obesity resulted from a lack of willpower. The best treatment, they said, is to take responsibility for yourself, go on a diet and exercise. Obesity specialists said the survey painted an alarming picture. They said the findings went against evidence about the science behind the disease, and showed that outdated notions about obesity persisted, to the detriment of those affected. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 22815 - Posted: 11.01.2016

By Julie Hecht Come across an image like this, and you’d be a weirdo not to investigate. Meet infrared thermography, a non-invasive way to visualize changes to body surface temperature. Thermographic video cameras not only produce images that would make Andy Warhol proud (or at least sue for infringement), but the tool allows researchers to assess physiological changes—and potentially emotional states—in a wide variety of species like distantly related BFFs Canis familiaris and Homo sapiens. Think about it—physiological changes are part of the emotional response. When you are frightened, blood rushes away from your extremities to get your muscles ready to go, which means your extremities get cooler as your core gets warmer. Infrared thermography, which captures changes to body surface temperature, is going to pick this up. The tip of a scared person’s nose gets cooler (more blue) under an infrared camera, and studies find that when scared or distressed, rat paws and tails appear cooler, as do the outer parts of sheep and rabbit ears. Dog ears recently caught the attention of Stefanie Riemer and colleagues at the Animal Behavior, Cognition and Welfare Research Group (Twitter) at the University of Lincoln, UK. They wanted to know whether dog ears would show differential blood-flow patterns in response to something good as well as something less good. Dogs participated in a separation test where they were briefly alone in a novel environment (which elicits short-term distress) and then reunited with people (typically a positive experience). The separation, the researchers assumed, would be associated with negative emotions and therefore cooling of the ears, while being reunited with people (excellent!) would show an increase in ear temperature. The study appears in the current issue of Physiology & Behavior. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 22814 - Posted: 11.01.2016

By Jesse Singal For a long time, the United States’ justice system has been notorious for its proclivity for imprisoning children. Because of laws that grant prosecutors and judges discretion to bump juveniles up to the category of “adult” when they commit crimes deemed serious enough by the authorities, the U.S. is an outlier in locking up kids, with some youthful defendants even getting life sentences. Naturally, this has attracted a great deal of outrage and advocacy from human-rights organizations, who argue that kids, by virtue of not lacking certain judgment, foresight, and decision-making abilities, should be treated a bit more leniently. Writing for the Marshall Project and drawing on some interesting brain science, Dana Goldstein takes the argument about youth incarceration even further: We should also rethink our treatment of offenders who are young adults. As Goldstein explains, the more researchers study the brain, the more they realize that it takes decades for the organ to develop fully and to impart to its owners their full, adult capacities for reasoning. “Altogether,” she writes, “the research suggests that brain maturation continues into one’s twenties and even thirties.” Many of these insights come from the newest generation of neuroscience research. “Everyone has always known that there are behavioral changes throughout the lifespan,” Catherine Lebel, an assistant professor of radiology at the University of Calgary who has conducted research into brain development, told Goldstein. “It’s only with new imaging techniques over the last 15 years that we’ve been able to get at some of these more subtle changes.” ! © 2016, New York Media LLC.

Keyword: Attention; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22813 - Posted: 11.01.2016

Bedtime use of cellphones or tablets by children — even just having access to them — is consistently linked to excessive daytime sleepiness and poor sleep, researchers say. They called on teachers, health care professionals, parents and children to be educated about the damaging influence of device use on sleep. The portable media devices have entered the bedroom, giving children unprecedented access to technology and media before researchers have had a chance to explore the positive and negative impacts. To explore whether there's an association between use of, or access to, media devices and sleep quantity and quality, researchers reviewed 20 sleep studies involving 125,198 children aged six to 19. In Monday's issue of JAMA Pediatrics, the reviewers concluded there's strong and consistent evidence of an association between access to or use of devices and reduced sleep quantity (defined as less than 10 hours for children and less than nine hours for adolescents) or quality, as well as increased daytime sleepiness. The way device use leads to poor sleep is thought to be light emission. But the review looked at examples of holding a device in the bedroom and not using it, which excludes light emission as the sole mechanism, said study author Ben Carter of the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London. "We are presenting results that highlight that it looks likely there are also other causes," Carter said in an email. ©2016 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 22812 - Posted: 11.01.2016

Emily Sohn After a mother killed her four young children and then herself last month in rural China, onlookers quickly pointed to life circumstances. The family lived in extreme poverty, and bloggers speculated that her inability to escape adversity pushed her over the edge. Can poverty really cause mental illness? It's a complex question that is fairly new to science. Despite high rates of both poverty and mental disorders around the world, researchers only started probing the possible links about 25 years ago. Since then, evidence has piled up to make the case that, at the very least, there is a connection. People who live in poverty appear to be at higher risk for mental illnesses. They also report lower levels of happiness. That seems to be true all over the globe. In a 2010 review of 115 studies that spanned 33 countries across the developed and developing worlds, nearly 80 percent of the studies showed that poverty comes with higher rates of mental illness. Among people living in poverty, those studies also found, mental illnesses were more severe, lasted longer and had worse outcomes. And there's growing evidence that levels of depression are higher in poorer countries than in wealthier ones. Those kinds of findings challenge a long-held myth of the "poor but happy African sitting under a palm tree," says Johannes Haushofer, an economist and neurobiologist who studies interactions between poverty and mental health at Princeton University. © 2016 npr

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 22811 - Posted: 10.31.2016

By Diana Kwon Can you feel your heart beating? Most people cannot, unless they are agitated or afraid. The brain masks the sensation of the heart in a delicate balancing act—we need to be able to feel our pulse racing occasionally as an important signal of fear or excitement, but most of the time the constant rhythm would be distracting or maddening. A growing body of research suggests that because of the way the brain compensates for our heartbeat, it may be vulnerable to perceptual illusions—if they are timed just right. In a study published in May in the Journal of Neuroscience, a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne conducted a series of studies on 143 participants and found that subjects took longer to identify a flashing object when it appeared in sync with the rhythm of their heartbeats. Using functional MRI, they also found that activity in the insula, a brain area associated with self-awareness, was suppressed when people viewed these synchronized images. The authors suggest that the flashing object was suppressed by the brain because it got lumped in with all the other bodily changes that occur with each heartbeat—the eyes make tiny movements, eye pressure changes slightly, the chest expands and contracts. “The brain knows that the heartbeat is coming from the self, so it doesn't want to be bothered by the sensory consequences of these signals,” says Roy Salomon, one of the study's co-authors. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 22810 - Posted: 10.31.2016

A snake with the largest venom glands in the world could hold the answer to pain relief, scientists have found. Dubbed the "killer of killers", the long-glanded blue coral snake is known to prey on the likes of king cobras. The venom of the two-metre-long snake native to South East Asia acts "almost immediately" and causes prey to spasm. New research published in the journal Toxin found it targets receptors which are critical to pain in humans and could be used as a method of treatment. "Most snakes have a slow-acting venom that works like a powerful sedative. You get sleepy, slow, before you die," said Dr Bryan Fry of the University of Queensland who is one of a team of researchers working on a study into the effect of the snake's venom. "This snake's venom however, works almost immediately because it usually preys on very dangerous animals that need to be quickly killed before they can retaliate. It's the killer of killers." Turning into medicine? Cone snails and scorpions are some of a handful of invertebrates whose venom has been studied for its medical use. However, as a vertebrate, the snake is evolutionarily closer to humans, and so a medicine developed from its venom could potentially be more effective, says Dr Fry. "The venom targets our sodium channels, which are central to our transmission of pain. We could potentially turn this into something that could help relieve pain, and which might work better on us." The snake's venom glands extend to up to one-quarter of its body length. "It's got freaky venom glands, the longest of any in the world, but it's so beautiful. It's easily my favourite species of snake," said Dr Fry. © 2016 BBC.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 22809 - Posted: 10.31.2016

Erin Wayman SALT LAKE CITY — The earliest primate was a tiny, solitary tree dweller that liked the night life. Those are just some conclusions from new reconstructions of the primate common ancestor, presented October 27 at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Eva Hoffman, now a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, and colleagues at Yale University looked at behavioral and ecological data from 178 modern primate species. Examining patterns of traits across the primate family tree, the researchers inferred the most likely characteristics of ancestors at different branching points in the tree — all the way back to the common ancestor. This ancient primate, which may have lived some 80 million to 70 million years ago, was probably no bigger than a guinea pig, lived alone and gave birth to one offspring at a time, the researchers suggest. Living in trees and active at night, the critter probably ventured out to the ends of tree branches to eat fruits, leaves and insects. But this mix of traits probably didn’t arise in primates, Hoffman says. After adding tree shrews and colugos — primates’ closest living relatives — to the analysis, the researchers concluded these same attributes were also present in the three groups’ common ancestor. So explanations of early primate evolution that rely on these features need to be reconsidered, Hoffman says. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 22808 - Posted: 10.31.2016

By STEPH YIN Halloween is here again. That means your co-workers have planted surprise spiders around the office. You’ve been invited to a haunted hayride. Your neighbor’s yard has a full cemetery, rigged with motion detectors and pop-up zombies. Chicken-livered from the start, I have always dreaded this time of year. Haunted houses, ghost tours and horror film fests are not my thing, and why people love having the daylights scared out of them completely escapes me. I decided to try to understand my friends who are on the lookout for thrills this time of year. As it turns out, there are many possible reasons some people like to be scared stiff. Each person’s threshold for experiences that provoke fear is made up of a unique recipe that blends nature and nurture. “The ingredients vary from person to person,” said Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University and a former president of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Farley is interested in what draws certain people to extreme behaviors, like driving racecars, climbing Mount Everest and flying hot air balloons across oceans. In the 1980s, he coined the term “Type T” personality to refer to the behavioral profile of thrill-seekers. What makes someone thrill-seeking, he said, comes down to a mix of genes, environment and early development. Spooky Science Stories, Just in Time for Halloween Gather around as the crypt keepers of our Science department share scientific curiosities of things that slither and crawl and fly. David Zald, a neuropsychologist at Vanderbilt University, studies one piece of the equation. His research partly focuses on dopamine, a chemical involved in our brain’s response to reward. In the past, he has found that people who lack what he calls “brakes” on dopamine release tend to pursue thrilling activities. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 22807 - Posted: 10.29.2016

By Bob Holmes It’s not something to be sniffed at. Computers have cracked a problem that has stumped chemists for centuries: predicting a molecule’s odour from its structure. The feat may allow perfumers and flavour specialists to create new products with much less trial and error. Unlike vision and hearing, the result of which can be predicted by analysing wavelengths of light or sound, our sense of smell has long remained inscrutable. Olfactory chemists have never been able to predict how a given molecule will smell, except in a few special cases, because so many aspects of a molecule’s structure could be important in determining its odour. Andreas Keller and Leslie Vosshall at Rockefeller University in New York City decided to crowdsource the power of machine learning to address the problem. First, they had 49 volunteers rate the odour of 476 chemicals according to how intense and how pleasant the smell was, and how well it matched 19 other descriptors, such as garlic, spice or fruit. Then they released the data for 407 of the chemicals, along with 4884 different variables measuring chemical structure, and invited anyone to develop machine-learning algorithms that would make sense of the patterns. They used the remaining 69 chemicals to evaluate the accuracy of the algorithms of the 22 teams that took up the challenge. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 22806 - Posted: 10.29.2016

By David Tuller After living in Oklahoma for 40 years, Nita and Doug Thatcher retired in 2009 to the Rust Belt city of Lorain, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb that hugs Lake Erie. When Nita needed to find a new primary care doctor, a friend recommended someone from the Cleveland Clinic. Nita knew the institution’s reputation for cutting-edge research and superior medical services. But as a longtime patient grappling with chronic fatigue syndrome, a debilitating disorder that scientists still don’t fully understand, she was wary when she learned that the clinic was promoting a common but potentially dangerous treatment for the illness: a steady increase in activity known as graded exercise therapy. The notion that people with chronic fatigue syndrome should be able to exercise their way back to health has enjoyed longstanding and widespread support, and “graded exercise” has become the de facto standard of clinical care. This approach has obvious intuitive appeal. Exercise helps all kinds of illnesses, and it’s a great tool for boosting energy. How could it possibly hurt? British psychiatrists and psychologists developed the graded exercise strategy for treating chronic fatigue syndrome during the 1990s. They offered a straightforward rationale: These patients were not medically sick but severely out of shape (“deconditioned”) from prolonged avoidance of activity. And they avoided activity because they wrongly believed they had a biological disease that would get worse if they overexerted themselves. During treatment, patients were encouraged to question this “dysfunctional cognition,” view any resurgent symptoms as transient, and push through the exhaustion and pain to rebuild their strength. Copyright 2016 Undark

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 22805 - Posted: 10.29.2016

By Ruth Williams .Newly made cells in the brains of mice adopt a more complex morphology and connectivity when the animals encounter an unusual environment than if their experiences are run-of-the-mill. Researchers have now figured out just how that happens. According to a study published today (October 27) in Science, a particular type of cell—called an interneuron—in the hippocampus processes the animals’ experiences and subsequently shapes the newly formed neurons. “We knew that experience shapes the maturation of these new neurons, but what this paper does is it lays out the entire circuit through which that happens,” said Heather Cameron, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda who was not involved with the work. “It’s a really nicely done piece of work because they go step-by-step and show all of the cells that are involved and how they’re connected.” Most of the cells in the adult mammalian brain are mature and don’t divide, but in a few regions, including an area of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus, neurogenesis occurs. The dentate gyrus is thought to be involved in the formation of new memories. In mice, for instance, exploring novel surroundings electrically activates the dentate gyrus and can affect the production, maturation, and survival of the newly born cells. Now, Alejandro Schinder and his team at the Leloir Institute in Buenos Aires, Argentina, have investigated the process in detail. © 1986-2016 The Scientist

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 22804 - Posted: 10.29.2016

Ramin Skibba Some common swifts spend ten months in flight without taking a break, setting a flight record that would be the envy of Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. Researchers report these long hauls, which occurred during migrations between Scandinavia and central Africa, on 27 October in Current Biology1. Ornithologists and birdwatchers have speculated about the long-distance prowess of common swifts (Apus apus) since the 1960s. People had seen the birds fill the sky in Liberia, for example, but couldn't find any nearby roost sites where the birds might land. Scientists attached tags that combined tiny data loggers and accelerometers to the 40-gram birds to record their route and flight activity during their annual journey. The team tracked 13 individual birds, some for multiple seasons, starting and ending at their breeding grounds in Sweden. The researchers found that some of the birds made a few brief night landings in winter but remained airborne for 99% of the time. Three birds didn't touch down once in the entire ten months. “These long-term flights confirm what everybody suspected for quite some time now,” says Felix Liechti of the Swiss Ornithological Institute in Sempach. Other birds can remain aloft for long periods. Alpine swifts (Tachymarptis melba) fly nonstop for half the year during their migrations2. And the much larger frigate birds (Fregata minor) off the coast of Ecuador can go for two months without landing while they forage for food in the ocean. They can even sleep on the wing3. But common swifts are in a class of their own. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 22803 - Posted: 10.28.2016

By Catherine Caruso Babies and children undergo massive brain restructuring as they mature, and for good reason—they have a whole world of information to absorb during their sprint toward adulthood. This mental renovation doesn’t stop there, however. Adult brains continue to produce new cells and restructure themselves throughout life, and a new study in mice reveals more about the details of this process and the important role environmental experience plays. Through a series of experiments, researchers at the Leloir Institute in Buenos Aires showed that when adult mice are exposed to stimulating environments, their brains are able to more quickly integrate new brain cells into existing neural networks through a process that involves new and old cells connecting to one another via special helper cells called interneurons. The adult mammalian brain, long believed to lack the capacity to make new cells, has two main areas that continuously produce new neurons throughout life. One of these areas, the hippocampus (which is involved in memory, navigation, mood regulation and stress response) produces new neurons in a specialized region called the dentate gyrus. Many previous studies have focused on how the dentate gyrus produces new neurons and what happens to these neurons as they mature, but Alejandro Schinder and his colleagues at Leloir wanted to go one step further and understand how new neurons produced by the dentate gyrus are incorporated into the existing neural networks of the brain, and whether environment affects this process. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22802 - Posted: 10.28.2016

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS Neither of the two drugs used most frequently to prevent migraines in children is more effective than a sugar pill, according to a study published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers stopped the large trial early, saying the evidence was clear even though the drugs — the antidepressant amitriptyline and the epilepsy drug topiramate — had been shown to prevent migraines in adults. “The medication didn’t perform as well as we thought it would, and the placebo performed better than you would think,” said Scott Powers, the lead author of the study and a director of the Headache Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. A migraine is a neurological illness characterized by pulsating headache pain, sometimes accompanied by nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light and noise. It’s a common childhood condition. Up to 11 percent of 7- to 11-year-olds and 23 percent of 15-year-olds have migraines. At 31 sites nationwide, 328 migraine sufferers aged 8 to 17 were randomly assigned to take amitriptyline, topiramate or a placebo pill for 24 weeks. Patients with episodic migraines (fewer than 15 headache days a month) and chronic migraines (15 or more headache days a month) were included. The aim was to figure out which drug was more effective at reducing the number of headache days, and to gauge which one helped children to stop missing school or social activities. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 22801 - Posted: 10.28.2016

Katherine Hobson Placebos can't cure diseases, but research suggests that they seem to bring some people relief from subjective symptoms, such as pain, nausea, anxiety and fatigue. But there's a reason your doctor isn't giving you a sugar pill and telling you it's a new wonder drug. The thinking has been that you need to actually believe that you're taking a real drug in order to see any benefits. And a doctor intentionally deceiving a patient is an ethical no-no. So placebos have pretty much been tossed in the "garbage pail" of clinical practice, says Ted Kaptchuk, director of the Program for Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In an attempt to make them more useful, he has been studying whether people might see a benefit from a placebo even if they knew it was a placebo, with no active ingredients. An earlier study found that so-called "open-label" or "honest" placebos improved symptoms among people with irritable bowel syndrome. And Kaptchuk and his colleagues found the same effect among people with garden-variety lower back pain, the most common kind of pain reported by American adults. The study included 83 people in Portugal, all of whom had back pain that wasn't caused by cancer, fractures, infections or other serious conditions. All the participants were told that the placebo was an inactive substance containing no medication. They were told that the body can automatically respond to placebos, that a positive attitude can help but isn't necessary and that it was important to take the pills twice a day for the full three weeks. © 2016 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 22800 - Posted: 10.28.2016

Nicola Davis A brown, pebble-sized object found in a rock pool on a beach near Bexhill, Sussex bears the first evidence of fossilised dinosaur brain tissue, scientists say. Found in 2004 by an amateur fossil collector, the object is the cast of a dinosaur’s brain cavity, and appears to show a thin veneer of mineralised tissues on its surface. Scientists say the find is most likely from a relative of the Iguanodon, which lived around 125 million years ago. Large, hefty herbivores, Iguanodons reached up around eight metres in length, could walk on either two legs or all fours and boasted sharp spikes on their thumbs - a feature initially thought to be a horn on the nose and immortalised as such in the Victorian dinosaur sculptures of Crystal Palace Park. While casts of the inside of dinosaur brain cases have been found before, it is the first time fossilised brain soft tissue has been discovered for any land-living vertebrate. “The most striking thing is that something as delicate as brain tissue, and which you wouldn’t expect to ever see, has been preserved,” said Alex Liu, co-author of the research from the University of Cambridge. “It just speaks volumes [about] the spectacular preservational quality that can be obtained in the fossil record even 130 million years after this dinosaur is alive.” Writing in a special publication from the Geological Society of London to commemorate the work of the late co-author Martin Brasier, an international team of researchers describe how the cast was discovered near other dinosaur remains, including ribs and leg bones. “We can’t say it is from the same organism, but it is from a fairly large dinosaur,” said Liu. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 22799 - Posted: 10.28.2016

By Brian Owens Chimpanzees and their relatives bonobos are closer than we thought. Bonobos seem to have donated genes to chimps at least twice in the roughly two million years since they last shared an ancestor. The two closely related apes have occasionally interbred in captivity, and bonobos are renowned for their free and easy sex life. But the finding that they interbred in the wild was unexpected. The two species split sometime between 1.5 and 2.1 million years ago, around the same time that the Congo River system formed. Wild bonobo populations are entirely contained in that river system, separated from two nearby subspecies of chimps, the eastern and central subspecies. Scientists assumed the river was an impenetrable barrier, says Christina Hvilsom from Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark, one of the researchers who worked on the genetic project. But it turns out that it must have been breached more than once – although it’s not clear how that happened. Hvilsom and her colleagues weren’t actually looking for genetic evidence of ancient interspecies erotica. They were mapping genetic markers that could be used to determine where illegally traded chimps came from so they could be returned to their homes in the wild. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 22798 - Posted: 10.28.2016

By Melissa Dahl A rule that spans time and space and morning routines: It is entirely too easy to underestimate the time it takes to get to work. Maybe once — one time — it took just 20 minutes to get to work, but it typically takes 25 to 30, and you know that, but still you leave late and, thus, arrive late. It’s dumb. It is also, maybe, human nature. As Christian Jarrett at BPS Research Digest reports, a team of neuroscientists has just uncovered a very handy if rather complicated excuse for tardiness — it seems people tend to underestimate how long it will take to travel familiar routes. The laws of time and space do not actually bend in order to transport you to work or school more quickly, but at least part of you believes that they will. And yet the oddest part of this new study, published in the journal Hippocampus, is that the participants tended to overestimate the physical length of those routes, even as they underestimated how long it would take to travel them. It does make a certain amount of sense that people would exaggerate the breadth of familiar distances, because the level of detail you’ve stored about them matters to your memory. If you remember every Starbucks and street corner you pass on the way you usually walk to school, for instance, the walking route will likely feel longer when you recall it than one you don’t know as well. As Jarrett explains, the researchers “thought a more detailed neural representation would make that space seem larger.” And when they asked a group of students — all of whom had been living in the same building in London for 9 months — to draw a little map of their neighborhood, this is indeed what they found. The students exaggerated the physical distance of the routes they walked the most, drawing their maps a little bigger they should have. © 2016, New York Media LLC.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 22797 - Posted: 10.28.2016