Cognitive science news

City mockingbirds can tell the difference between individual people

The mockingbird has the ability to tell the difference between individual humans, regardless of the clothes they wear, where they can tell one person from another after less than a minute.

An easy way to get kids to eat asparagus? Not quite, but still, a very neat trick

Planting false memories that they loved asparagus as children can cause adults to improve their taste for asparagus.

Music affects how we perceive facial expressions

Emotions evoked by music could be transferred to the sense of vision, which in turn could influence how the emotions in facial expressions are perceived.

Guys on dates want to know: Is it really impossible to ignore an attractive face?

Attractive faces can distract us from tasks even outside of social contexts.

Electrical stimulation produces feelings of free will

The posterior parietal cortex in the brain helps produce the intention to move and predicts what the movement would feel like, all before a single muscle twitches.

Living abroad linked with enhanced creativity

Experiments with simple creative tasks indicate that the experience of living abroad may enhance creativity.

Cognitive Control Is Improved By Taking A Step Back - Literally

Literally taking a step back appears to improve cognitive control in an experiment where subjects must name the colors of words while not reading the words themselves.

How are numbers related to your body movements? Depends on how you read words

Experiments with Palestinian and Israeli students suggest that different response times from left and right hands with low and high numbers is due to a combination of left-right/right-left reading and left-right/right-left numbering.

The Fate of Forgotten Memories: Sudden Death, Not Gradual Decay

An experiment with 12 subjects indicates that memories are forgotten suddenly instead of fading away gradually.

It's those Voodoo correlations again ... brain imagers accused of "double dipping"

A survey of 134 neuroscience papers with fMRI data showed that 42 percent of them used circular analysis, bringing their conclusions under doubt.

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