By Laura Sanders When a woman born without limbs watches someone else sew, copycat regions in her brain activate even though she can’t hold a needle herself. Additional brain regions also lend support, demonstrating how flexible the brain is when it comes to observing and understanding the actions of others. Scientists have known for over a decade about the mirror system, a network of brain regions usually activated by watching and performing an action. But just how the brain smoothly and quickly intuits what other people are doing, particularly when the action isn’t something the observer can do, has been unclear, says study coauthor Lisa Aziz-Zadeh of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In the study, a middle-aged, healthy woman born with no arms and legs underwent brain scans as she watched videos of people performing actions such as holding and eating an apple slice, sewing with a needle and tapping a finger. Actions that the woman was capable of performing herself activated the mirror system, including parts of the brain that control movement. Mirror areas kicked in even for tasks the woman accomplishes in a different way, such as picking up food using her mouth instead of hands. (The participant had prosthetics briefly as a teenager but hadn’t used them in the past 40 years.) When the woman witnessed actions that were impossible for her, such as using scissors, her brain’s mirror system still kicked in, but additional brain regions were recruited to help. These extra regions aren’t normally needed when people watch a task they’re able to perform, the researchers write in an upcoming Cerebral Cortex. These regions are thought to be involved in a process called “mentalizing,” in which a person tries to understand what someone else is thinking. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 15564 - Posted: 07.16.2011

by Nic Fleming At high altitude, even the fittest mountaineer's ability to move freely can vanish in the thin air. But it's not the fault of your muscles. In fact, this drop-off in athletic performance in low-oxygen conditions may be mostly in the mind: the brain kicks in to prevent potentially damaging overexertion. The cause of muscle fatigue has been the subject of much debate. Some researchers emphasise the importance of physical changes such as lactic acid build-up, while others back a "central governor" theory whereby fatigue is a sensation generated by the brain. Emma Ross of the University of Brighton, UK, and colleagues asked 11 men to carry out knee extensor muscle exercises while breathing normal air – which has 21 per cent oxygen – as well as mixes with 16 per cent, 13 per cent and 10 per cent oxygen to represent mild, moderate and severe hypoxia. As the oxygen levels fell, so did the forces the participants could generate voluntarily. To assess the role of the brain in muscle fatigue, the team repeated the experiment using non-invasive brain stimulation to artificially generate motor cortex signals, overriding voluntary control and triggering knee muscle contraction. Measuring the difference between the forces participants could generate voluntarily and those created by the brain stimulation helped Ross and colleagues establish that the brain contributes 18 per cent to muscle fatigue with normal oxygen, 25 per cent for mild to moderate hypoxia and 54 per cent for severe hypoxia (Journal of Applied Physiology, DOI: 10.1152/japplphysiol.00458.2010). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Muscles
Link ID: 15563 - Posted: 07.16.2011

By Larry Greenemeier Internet,memory,trivia TOTAL RECALL?: The advent of the Internet and near-ubiquitous information at our fingertips makes it less critical for us to commit items to memory. Using the Internet as a mental crutch is not necessarily a bad thing, according to researchers. Image: IMAGE COURTESY OF ALEX HINDS, VIA ISTOCKPHOTO.COM Has the Internet dumbed down society or simply become an external storage unit that enhances the human brain's memory capacity? With Google, Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia at our beck and call via smart phones, tablets and laptops, the once essential function of committing facts to memory has become little more than a flashback to flash cards. This shift is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it irreversible, according to a team of researchers whose study on search engines and learning appears in the July 15 issue of Science. Led by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow, the researchers conducted a series of experiments whose results suggest that when people are faced with difficult questions, they are likely to think that the Internet will help them find the answers. In fact, those who expect to able to search for answers to difficult questions online are less likely to commit the information to memory. People tend to memorize answers if they believe that it is the only way they will have access to that information in the future. Regardless of whether they remember the facts, however, people tend to recall the Web sites that hold the answers they seek. In this way, the Internet has become a primary form of external or "transactive" memory (a term coined by Sparrow's one-time academic advisor, social psychologist Daniel Wegner), where information is stored collectively outside the brain. This is not so different from the pre-Internet past, when people relied on books, libraries and one another—such as using a "lifeline" on the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire?—for information. Now, however, besides oral and printed sources of information, a lion's share of our collective and institutional knowledge bases reside online and in data storage. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15562 - Posted: 07.16.2011

By JAMES GORMAN From the wild to Wall Street, as everyone knows, the alpha male runs the show, enjoying power over other males and, as a field biologist might put it, the best access to mating opportunities. The beta is No. 2 in the wolf pack or the baboon troop, not such a bad position. But conversationally, the term has become an almost derisive label for the nice guy, the good boy all grown up, the husband women look for after the fling with Russell Crowe. It may now be time to take a step back from alpha worship. Field biologists, the people who gave the culture the alpha/beta trope in the first place, have found there can be a big downside to being No. 1. Laurence R. Gesquiere, a research associate in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, and colleagues report in the journal Science that in five troops of wild baboons in Kenya studied over nine years, alpha males showed very high stress levels, as high as those of the lowest-ranking males. The stress, they suggested, was probably because of the demands of fighting off challengers and guarding access to fertile females. Beta males, who fought less and had considerably less mate guarding to do, had much lower stress levels. They had fewer mating opportunities than the alphas, but they did get some mating in, more than any lower-ranking males. After all, when the alpha gets in another baboon bar fight, who’s going to take the girl home? © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Stress
Link ID: 15561 - Posted: 07.16.2011

By Jennifer Carpenter Science reporter, BBC News A half-male, half-female butterfly has hatched at London's Natural History Museum. A line down the insect's middle marks the division between its male side and its more colourful female side. Failure of the butterfly's sex chromosomes to separate during fertilisation is behind this rare sexual chimera. Once it has lived out its month-long life, the butterfly will join the museum's collection. Only 0.01% of hatching butterflies are gynandromorphs; the technical term for these strange asymmetrical creatures. "So you can understand why I was bouncing off of the walls when I learned that... [it] had emerged in the puparium," said butterfly enthusiast Luke Brown from London's Natural History Museum. Mr Brown built his first butterfly house when he was seven, and has hatched out over 300 thousand butterflies; this is only his third gynandromorph. Half and half It is not only the wings that are affected, he explained. The butterfly's body is split in two, its sexual organs are half and half, and even its antennae are different lengths. "It is a complete split; part-male, part-female... welded together inside," he told the BBC. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15560 - Posted: 07.14.2011

By Nadia Webb In studies that observe the brain in action, the right hemisphere seems to be the sexy hemisphere. It lights up during orgasm—so much so that, in one study, much of the cortex went dark, leaving the right prefrontal cortex as a bright island. New research suggests the right hemisphere is also hyperactive amongst the “hypersexual,” a symptom of brain injury loosely defined as groping, propositioning or masturbating in public without shame. What is surprising about this is that pleasure is classically thought of as the province of the left hemisphere, not the right. The left is most active when recalling happy memories, meditating on love for another, and during the expansiveness of grandiosity or mania. The left hemisphere is even preferentially more active among people free of depression and less active among the unhappy. If the brain were a simpler and more cooperative organ, the left hemisphere would be lit up like the Fourth of July during an orgasm. Instead, it is surprisingly silent. Why might this be so? Until eight years ago, neuroscience had little scientific basis from which to comment on bliss, sexual or otherwise. Despite our public fascination with things sexual, as researcher, Gemma O’Brien put it, “orgasm is not impersonal and third person enough for the sciences.” Neuroscience was hobbled by the avoidance of such squashy topics, even if it meant setting aside important parts of human experience. However, a clearer portrait of pleasure is now emerging. Bliss, both sacred and profane, shares the diminution of self-awareness, alterations in bodily perception and decreased sense of pain. And while the left frontal lobe may be linked to pleasure, the other three characteristics are bilateral. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15559 - Posted: 07.14.2011

Meredith Wadman The contentious issue of drug-industry influence over medical-research writing erupted on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia this week. A professor of psychiatry has alleged that several colleagues — including the chair of his department — allowed their names to be added to a manuscript while ceding control to the global pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The professor, Jay Amsterdam, also claims that the manuscript, written with an unacknowledged contractor paid by GSK, unduly promotes the company's antidepressant drug Paxil (paroxetine), the subject of the study. "The published manuscript was biased in its conclusions, made unsubstantiated efficacy claims and downplayed the adverse-event profile of Paxil," Amsterdam's lawyer wrote in an 8 July letter to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), the body responsible for investigating research misconduct in US Public Health Service agencies and its grant recipients. The letter accuses the study's academic authors of engaging in scientific misconduct by allowing their names to be attached to the manuscript (C. Nemeroff et al. Am. J. Psychiatr. 158, 906–912; 2001), which has been cited more than 250 times. Documents accompanying Amsterdam's complaint are offered as evidence that "most if not all" of the authors were handpicked by GSK, working in conjunction with the medical-communications company Scientific Therapeutics Information (STI) in Springfield, New Jersey, to lend credibility to a result that Amsterdam says places Paxil in an overly favourable light. In one such document, Karl Rickels, a psychiatrist not involved with the study who looked at the issue for the department in 2001 said that "apparently … [academic] participants never had a chance to review or even just see the manuscript before it went to press". © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 15558 - Posted: 07.14.2011

By Susan Milius Lizards everywhere may be scampering a little taller now that an Anolis species from tropical tree canopies has passed tests for behavioral flexibility. “These guys are smarter than people say,” reports behavioral ecologist Manuel Leal of Duke University in Durham, N.C. Cognitive scientists have studied birds’ and mammals’ powers to solve unexpected problems and learn new rules, but research on lizard cognition has been limited. Yet several Anolis evermanni lizards collected from Puerto Rico and brought into the lab coped with devices not seen in nature that were modeled on tests of avian brain power, Leal and Brian Powell, also of Duke, report in an upcoming issue of Biology Letters. In a series of tests, four out of six lizards figured out how to remove plastic lids firmly stuck on a food box and how to ignore lids with other colors introduced as possible distractors. Two lizards eventually were able to undo their previous training and choose the “wrong” color because researchers had reversed the rules. Lizards indeed deserve more respect, says Walter Wilczynski of Georgia State University in Atlanta, who studies the neural basis of animal behavior. “I agree with the authors that reptiles, and amphibians for that matter, are generally dismissed as being incapable of the simplest cognitive task,” he says, “despite the fact that whenever researchers do a careful study like this one, it turns out that, in fact, they do learn, often in a sophisticated way.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 15557 - Posted: 07.14.2011

By Steve Connor, Science Editor Skin cells from a 30-year-old woman have been turned directly into mature nerve cells similar to those found in the brain using a procedure that promises to revolutionise the emerging field of regenerative medicine. Scientists said they were astonished to discover that they could convert a person's skin tissue into functioning nerve cells – bypassing an intermediate stem-cell stage – by the relatively simple procedure of adding a few short strands of RNA, a genetic molecule similar to DNA. The breakthrough could soon lead to the generation of different types of human brain cells in a test tube which could be used to study a range of neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. "A major problem in neurobiology has been the lack of a good human model. Neurons aren't like blood. They're not something people want to give up," said Gerald Crabtree, professor of pathology at Stanford University Medical Centre in California. The findings may also one day allow doctors to grow nerve cells directly from a patient's skin cells to regenerate damaged parts of their brain or spinal cord. It would for instance bypass the need to produce stem cells by creating human embryos or embryonic-like tissue. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Alzheimers; Stem Cells
Link ID: 15556 - Posted: 07.14.2011

Macular degeneration, a progressive, degenerative eye disease, is a leading cause of vision loss in people over 60. Stargardt’s disease, also called juvenile macular degeneration, is a similar illness that typically begins in late childhood. Here six men and women speak about how their vision problems have affected their lives. (Join the discussion here.) © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15555 - Posted: 07.14.2011

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. The Challenge: Can you solve a medical mystery involving a 38-year-old gardener with a leg rash, numbness and chills? The Presenting Problem: A 38-year-old man comes to the emergency room with a rash and numbness and tingling in his right leg. The Patient’s Story: The patient was working in his tiny city garden in Washington one afternoon when he felt a strange burning in his right foot. He took off the plastic garden sandal he was wearing but didn’t see anything under the layer of dark soil that he dusted off his foot. Half an hour later, when he looked at his leg, he noticed a burst of fluorescent purple climbing from his foot, over his ankle and nearly to the knee. On closer inspection, the lines of day-glo violet seemed to trace the veins in his leg. He still had a couple more hours of work to do that day, so rather than stopping, he pulled out his phone and snapped a couple of pictures of his leg. He was a healthy guy and wasn’t particularly worried. But by the end of the day he would be. As the man continued his work, he became aware that the burning sensation he’d felt in his foot was climbing up his leg, well past the knee. Still, he wanted to get the plants cleared and continued working for another couple of hours. Finally, he put away the shovel and other tools, cleared away the plants he’d pulled up and went in to take a shower. Under the hot stream he could see that the fluorescent purple rash had faded but was still visible. His leg now had that combination of numbness and tingling you get when a body part “falls asleep.” He dressed and joined his wife and 8-year-old daughter for a dinner of takeout pizza. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 15554 - Posted: 07.14.2011

by Michael Marshall Life is all about making decisions, and often the answers boil down to your personality. Do I have the nerve to quit my job? If I work in London can I deal with crowds of smelly people on buses? Am I willing to accept a hangover tomorrow morning? (Answers at the bottom of the page.) Personality and the ability to make difficult choices seem like human characteristics, but other animals had them long before we came along. Even the beadlet anemone can boast these traits, and it doesn't even have a brain. Yet individual anemones have distinct personalities, and they can make decisions in a remarkably nuanced way. "Personality" is one of those words like "intelligence" or "consciousness" that means different things to different people. But shorn of cultural baggage, it simply means that individuals consistently behave in particular ways. In that sense, animals as diverse as monkeys, fish, squid and insects have personalities. Mark Briffa of the University of Plymouth, UK, wondered if personalities might be found even in some of the simplest multicellular animals. Sea anemones are cnidarians, like jellyfish and corals, and unlike most species that evolved later they don't have discrete brains. Instead they have diffuse nets of nerves running through their bodies. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15553 - Posted: 07.14.2011

By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News The ability to breathe has been restored to mice with spinal cord injuries, in what US researchers describe as a medical first. Some patients with damaged spinal cords need ventilators as they are unable to breathe on their own. A report in the journal Nature showed a nerve graft, coupled with a protein, could restore breathing. Human trials could begin soon, which the charity Spinal Research said could be "potentially life-changing". Damage at the top of the spinal cord, around the neck, can interrupt messages to the diaphragm - a layer of muscle involved in breathing. The cord is notoriously resistant to repair. Techniques such as nerve grafts, which worked in the arms and legs, had shown limited success with the spinal cord, doctors at the Case Western Reserve University said. The spinal cord scars after it is damaged, and molecules - chondroitin sulphate proteoglycans - prevent nerves repairing and forming new connections. The researchers used a nerve graft to form a bridge across the scar at the same time as injecting an enzyme - chondoitinase ABC - which attacked the inhibitory molecules. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 15552 - Posted: 07.14.2011

NEW YORK — Children exposed to secondhand smoke at home may be more likely than their peers to have learning and behavioral problems, according to a new study. Researchers found that of more than 55,000 U.S. children younger than 12 years, six percent lived with a smoker. And those kids were more likely to have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a learning disability or "conduct disorder" than children in smoke-free homes. Even after accounting for a number of possible explanations -- like parents' incomes and education levels -- secondhand smoke was still tied to a higher risk of behavioral problems, said Hillel R. Alpert of the Harvard School of Public Health, one of the researchers on the work. Still, the findings don't prove a smoke-filled home is to blame, said Alpert, because other factors the study didn't look at could be at play. For instance, children exposed to secondhand smoke are often exposed to smoke while they are still in the womb. And mothers' smoking during pregnancy has been linked to increased risks of learning and behavioral problems. Alpert's team, whose results appear in the journal Pediatrics, had no information on mothers' smoking during pregnancy. It's also possible that parents who smoke have, themselves, a greater history of learning or behavior problems compared with non-smoking parents. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15551 - Posted: 07.14.2011

by Virginia Morell Parrots are talkative birds, with impressive, humanlike linguistic abilities. Also like us, male and female parrots are lifelong vocal learners. Because of these similarities, researchers have long wondered whether parrot chicks learn their first calls or if these sounds are innate. For the first time, scientists have succeeded in studying the calls of parrot chicks in the wild. They find that the birds do learn their first calls—and from their parents, much as human infants do. The findings suggest that parrots may be better than songbirds as models for studying how humans acquire speech. Like other parrot species, green-rumped parrotlets (Forpus passerinus), a parakeet-sized species that lives in South America, make what scientists term a signature contact call, a sound that functions much like a name. The birds use it to find and recognize mates and identify their chicks. Other studies have shown that wild parrots often imitate one another's contact calls—rather like someone calling out the name of a friend. "One study of another species of captive parrotlets suggested that individual birds are assigned names by their family members," says ornithologist Karl Berg of Cornell University. But he wanted to know whether the birds do this in the wild, too, and why. Captive studies cannot, by themselves, explain what function such behaviors serve in nature or how they evolved. But studying parrots in the wild is "extremely difficult" because they generally nest in hollows high in trees, says behavioral ecologist Timothy Wright of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, an expert on wild parrots. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 15550 - Posted: 07.14.2011

By DAVID DANELSKI Feeling a bit slow and depressed? It just might be the Inland area's foul air. Neuroscientists at Ohio State University have linked fine-particle air pollution to slow thinking, bad memory and depressive-like behaviors in mice. The exposed animals also were found to have abnormal brain cells, inhibiting the flow of electrical impulses that transmit information. The research appears to break new ground on what's known about the health effects of air pollution. Most of the hundreds of past studies have focused on how bad air impairs respiratory or cardiac health and on how death rates increase on polluted days. Research done on rats at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles suggests that several genes associated with common brain tumors and degenerative brain diseases are more active in rats exposed to freeway pollution. The Ohio State research team, however, wanted to know how the pollution affects mental health. They took samples of ambient air in Columbus, Ohio, and concentrated it seven times. Groups of mice breathed the air six hours a day, five days a week for 10 months. The air was five times worse than the average for Mira Loma, a community in northwest Riverside County that has among the worst fine-particle pollution in the nation. When run through memory and learning tests, the exposed mice couldn't think as well as those supplied with clean, filtered air. © 2011 Enterprise Media

Keyword: Depression; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 15549 - Posted: 07.14.2011

By TARA PARKER-POPE “Bet you can’t eat just one” (as the old potato-chip commercials had it) is, of course, a bet most of us end up losing. But why? Is it simple lack of willpower that makes fatty snacks irresistible, or are deeper biological forces at work? Some intriguing new research suggests the latter. Scientists in California and Italy reported last week that in rats given fatty foods, the body immediately began to release natural marijuanalike chemicals in the gut that kept them craving more. The findings are among several recent studies that add new complexity to the obesity debate, suggesting that certain foods set off powerful chemical reactions in the body and the brain. Yes, it’s still true that people gain weight because they eat more calories than they burn. But those compulsions may stem from biological systems over which the individual has no control. “I do think some people come into the world, and they are more responsive to food,” said Susan Carnell, a research associate at the Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition. “I think there are many different routes to obesity.” In the recent rat studies, by a team from the University of California, Irvine, and the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, the goal was to measure how taste alone affects the body’s response to food. Among rats given liquid diets high in fat, sugar or protein, the ones who got the fatty liquid had a striking reaction: As soon as it hit their taste buds, their digestive systems began producing endocannabinoids, chemicals similar to those produced by marijuana use. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15548 - Posted: 07.12.2011

By KAY E. HOLEKAMP We had just started our afternoon “obs” a few days ago when we found three adult hyenas, all high-ranking females, sleeping on an open hillside. Then we saw something they hadn’t yet noticed: a very large male African cape buffalo that appeared to be dying. We could see from his worn teeth that he was very old, and though he could move his legs, he couldn’t seem to lift his head. One thing about studying large carnivores is that feeding can be difficult to watch. Although hyenas quickly kill smaller prey like gazelle by crushing the neck or skull, they tend to take down larger animals by disembowelment, letting their target bleed out, but that can take some time. We always hope the prey animal is in shock while this is happening, as there would be nothing we could do to speed up the prey animal’s death in any case. As the poet Tennyson put it, nature really is “red in tooth and claw.” Eventually the three females got up from their nap and noticed the buffalo. They were silent as they approached it, avoiding its flailing limbs as they began to tear off pieces of flesh with their sharp teeth. When the dying animal bellowed in pain, its herd-mates rushed over and charged the hyenas, which scattered but then approached again to continue feeding. Still the hyenas were silent, suggesting either that they needed no help to subdue the prey or that they preferred not to share it with their clan mates. However, as often happens, other hyenas apparently heard the cries of the dying buffalo, and started appearing from all directions. The arriving clan members were all very excited to see roughly 1,500 pounds of fresh food already brought to ground! It was not until cubs that had recently graduated from the communal den began arriving at this kill site that we started to hear hyena voices. As each youngster arrived at the scene, it was clearly overwhelmed with excitement and nervousness. This could easily be seen in their body postures, their bristled tails and most of all in their voices. They grinned and groveled before their larger clan mates, and produced many loud “whoop” vocalizations. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 15547 - Posted: 07.12.2011

By PAULA SPAN Five years have passed since the Food and Drug Administration approved a vaccine against shingles. By now, experts had expected a substantial proportion of people older than 60, the most vulnerable population, to be protected from outbreaks of this nasty viral disease and the persistent, debilitating pain it can leave behind. Indeed, the vaccine, called Zostavax, could so sharply reduce the number of adults who suffer from shingles — currently more than one million a year — that in March, the Food and Drug Administration approved its use by those ages 50 and older. But even with this weapon at the ready, the campaign against shingles has bogged down. Some experts say it never really got under way. A combination of factors has dissuaded many physicians’ offices and clinics from carrying Zostavax. And its manufacturer, Merck, has been unable to produce sufficient quantities to meet even modest demand. Intermittent shortages that last months have kept the company from consistently marketing the vaccine and have forestalled public health campaigns that could have built awareness of the need for it. “It really, really has been frustrating,” said Dr. Rafael Harpaz, an epidemiologist at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “There hasn’t been a single year since the vaccine was licensed in 2006 that there’s been no problem with supply.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15546 - Posted: 07.12.2011

By Bill Briggs This is about to get ugly. Aussie researchers have invented what may be described as reverse beer goggles. As seen in the accompanying video -- which has topped a million views since the study team posted it on YouTube on Thursday -- female faces seem to morph into cartoonish monsters when viewed rapidly. (Strangely, Joan Rivers is not included in the sample.) Now ladies and gentlemen, especially you desperate singles lingering in the bars at closing time, please hold your boos, and refrain from declaring this discovery a giant leap backward for science. Believe it or not, the gnarly optical illusion has a practical purpose, says Matthew B. Thompson, one of the authors of a just-published paper on the effect. “We want to understand how people recognize and identify complex patterns. We have lots of experience with faces and process them effortlessly,” says Thompson, a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland. “In our lab, we use strange effects like this one to help us understand how people perceive faces -- for example, what makes someone attractive or easy to recognize.” But why do our eyes and brains start to interpret these mugs as repugnant? Let’s face it: Some seem to be minus-3s on the globally recognized Dude Scale of 1 to 10. Answering that very question is the next task for Thompson and his University of Queensland colleges -- lecturer Jason Tangen and researcher Sean Murphy. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 15545 - Posted: 07.12.2011