http://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. Hearing a verb related to physical action automatically increases the force with which people grip objects, but has no effect on their physical reaction if the word is presented in the negative form, according to research published December 5 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Pia Aravena and colleagues from the L2C2, Institute of Cognitive Sciences (CNRS/UCBL), France. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-positive-verbs-unconscious-physical-response.html Psychology & Psychiatry Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:00:24 EST news273930172 (Medical Xpress)—Researchers at the University of Iowa have documented an activity by infants that begins nearly from birth: They learn by taking inventory of the things they see. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-infants.html Psychology & Psychiatry Tue, 04 Dec 2012 13:10:50 EST news273849034 Borrowing from microfabrication techniques used in the semiconductor industry, MIT and Harvard Medical School (HMS) engineers have developed a simple and inexpensive way to create three-dimensional brain tissues in a lab dish. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-precisely-d-brain-tissues.html Neuroscience Thu, 29 Nov 2012 13:21:25 EST news273417677 A new imaging technique developed at MIT offers the first glimpse of the degeneration of two brain structures affected by Parkinson's disease. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-scientists-image-brain-deteriorate-parkinson.html Neuroscience Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:26:17 EST news273169560 New research shows a simple reason why even the most intelligent, complex brains can be taken by a swindler's story – one that upon a second look offers clues it was false. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-10-empathy-represses-analytic-thought-vice.html Neuroscience Tue, 30 Oct 2012 18:20:01 EST news270838172 For the past four decades, the "marshmallow test" has served as a classic experimental measure of children's self-control: will a preschooler eat one of the fluffy white confections now or hold out for two later? http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-10-marshmallow-revisited-gratification-nurture-nature.html Psychology & Psychiatry Thu, 11 Oct 2012 01:00:01 EST news269107006 The majority of languages—roughly 85 percent of them—can be sorted into two categories: those, like English, in which the basic sentence form is subject-verb-object ("the girl kicks the ball"), and those, like Japanese, in which the basic sentence form is subject-object-verb ("the girl the ball kicks"). http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-10-theory-linguistics-functional-cross-language-variations.html Psychology & Psychiatry Wed, 10 Oct 2012 08:03:23 EST news269074925 A new study led by MIT neuroscientists has found that brain scans of patients with social anxiety disorder can help predict whether they will benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-09-brain-scans-doctors-treatments-people.html Psychology & Psychiatry Thu, 06 Sep 2012 05:43:23 EST news266128991 The human brain can recognize thousands of different objects, but neuroscientists have long grappled with how the brain organizes object representation; in other words, how the brain perceives and identifies different objects. Now researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences have discovered that the brain organizes objects based on their physical size, with a specific region of the brain reserved for recognizing large objects and another reserved for small objects. Their findings, to be published in the June 21 issue of Neuron, could have major implications for fields like robotics, and could lead to a greater understanding of how the brain organizes and maps information. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-big-small-brain-discerning-size.html Neuroscience Wed, 20 Jun 2012 12:00:07 EST news259411418 Long before babies understand the story of Goldilocks, they have more than mastered the fairy tale heroine's method of decision-making. Infants ignore information that is too simple or too complex, focusing instead on situations that are "just right," according to a new study to be published in the journal PLoS ONE on May 23. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-goldilocks-effect-babies.html Psychology & Psychiatry Wed, 23 May 2012 17:00:12 EST news257010839 Gaining access to the inner workings of a neuron in the living brain offers a wealth of useful information: its patterns of electrical activity, its shape, even a profile of which genes are turned on at a given moment. However, achieving this entry is such a painstaking task that it is considered an art form; it is so difficult to learn that only a small number of labs in the world practice it. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-robot-reveals-brain-cells.html Neuroscience Sun, 06 May 2012 13:20:01 EST news255508667 Opening the door to the development of thought-controlled prosthetic devices to help people with spinal cord injuries, amputations and other impairments, neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Portugal have demonstrated that the brain is more flexible and trainable than previously thought. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-brain-flexible-trainable-previously-thought.html Neuroscience Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:00:09 EST news250084402 Women are often troubled with cyclical mood changes. Studies have shown a relationship between emotional disorders associated with the menstrual cycle and changes in estrogen level. The authors reviewed related research in the fields of neuroscience, psychology and endocrinology. Findings were published in Science China Life Sciences. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-estrogen-female-mood.html Other Sun, 22 Jan 2012 11:09:02 EST news246452932 What distinguishes information processing with conscious awareness from processing occurring without awareness? And, is there any role for conscious awareness in information processing, or is it just a byproduct, like the steam from the chimney of a train engine, which is significant, but has no functional role? http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-11-distinguishes-roles-conscious-subconscious-awareness.html Psychology & Psychiatry Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:18:02 EST news241877874 The human brain is bombarded with a cacophony of information from the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin. Now a team of scientists at the University of Rochester, Washington University in St. Louis, and Baylor College of Medicine has unraveled how the brain manages to process those complex, rapidly changing, and often conflicting sensory signals to make sense of our world. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-11-nerve-cells-key.html Neuroscience Sun, 20 Nov 2011 13:00:15 EST news241013592 Researchers have identified when an important milestone in infants' development occurs: the ability to transfer knowledge to new situations. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-07-infants-knowledge-months.html Psychology & Psychiatry Tue, 05 Jul 2011 15:43:18 EST news229099358 (Medical Xpress) -- Do you ever wonder about the stuff that makes up words? Why is a word a word, what goes into forming it, what's its history or why is it long or short? Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology do. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-context-short-words-year-old-language.html Psychology & Psychiatry Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:24:46 EST news227780366 Moral responses change as people age says a new study from the University of Chicago. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-moral-responses-people-age.html Psychology & Psychiatry Fri, 03 Jun 2011 05:27:36 EST news226297633 Over the past two decades, scientists have shown that babies only a few months old have a solid grasp on basic rules of the physical world. They understand that objects can't wink in and out of existence, and that objects can't "teleport" from one spot to another. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-05-babies-sophisticated-analyses-physical-world.html Psychology & Psychiatry Thu, 26 May 2011 14:00:01 EST news225629227 Understanding the actions of other people can be difficult for those with schizophrenia. Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered that impairments in a brain area involved in perception of social stimuli may be partly responsible for this difficulty. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-05-people-schizophrenia-social-cues.html Psychology & Psychiatry Tue, 24 May 2011 15:48:04 EST news225470872 New research by a team of University of Pennsylvania psychologists is helping to overturn the dominant theory of how children learn their first words, suggesting that it occurs more in moments of insight than gradually through repeated exposure. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-05-overturns-theory-children-words.html Psychology & Psychiatry Mon, 23 May 2011 16:06:24 EST news225385561 A team of cognitive scientists has good news for parents who are worried that they are setting a bad example for their children when they say "um" and "uh." A study conducted at the University of Rochester's Baby Lab shows that toddlers actually use their parents' stumbles and hesitations (technically referred to as disfluencies) to help them learn language more efficiently. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-04-parents-um-uh-toddlers-words.html Psychology & Psychiatry Thu, 14 Apr 2011 13:08:51 EST news222005304