When you enter a room, your brain is bombarded with sensory information. If the room is a place you know well, most of this information is already stored in long-term memory. However, if the room is unfamiliar to you, your ...
Dec 27, 2017
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Timing is critical for playing a musical instrument, swinging a baseball bat, and many other activities. Neuroscientists have come up with several models of how the brain achieves its exquisite control over timing, the most ...
Dec 4, 2017
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545
Babies as young as 10 months can assess how much someone values a particular goal by observing how hard they are willing to work to achieve it, according to a new study from MIT and Harvard University.
Nov 23, 2017
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Making decisions is not always easy, especially when choosing between two options that have both positive and negative elements, such as deciding between a job with a high salary but long hours, and a lower-paying job that ...
Nov 16, 2017
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1081
To survive and grow, a cell must properly assess the resources available and couple that with its growth and metabolism—a misstep in that calculus can potentially cause cell death or dysfunction. At the crux of these decisions ...
Nov 10, 2017
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226
How do people assign a cause to events they witness? Some philosophers have suggested that people determine responsibility for a particular outcome by imagining what would have happened if a suspected cause had not intervened.
Oct 17, 2017
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65
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. A new study from MIT reveals that babies as young as 15 months can learn to follow this advice. The researchers found that babies who watched an adult struggle at two different ...
Sep 21, 2017
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Mothers who experience an infection severe enough to require hospitalization during pregnancy are at higher risk of having a child with autism. Two new studies from MIT and the University of Massachusetts Medical School shed ...
Sep 13, 2017
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150
When we visit a friend or go to the beach, our brain stores a short-term memory of the experience in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. Those memories are later "consolidated"—that is, transferred to another part ...
Apr 6, 2017
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377
In adults, certain regions of the brain's visual cortex respond preferentially to specific types of input, such as faces or objects—but how and when those preferences arise has long puzzled neuroscientists.
Jan 11, 2017
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