The Fancier The Cortex, The Smarter The Brain?
How certain aspects of brain structure and function help determine how easily we learn new things, and how learning capacity contributes to individual differences in intelligence...

New Thoughts On Language Acquisition: Toddlers As Data Miners
Indiana University researchers are studying a ground-breaking theory that young children are able to learn large groups of words rapidly by data-mining.

Brain Imaging Suggests How Higher Education Helps To Buffer Older Adults From Cognitive Decline
College seems to pay off well into retirement. A new study from the University of Toronto sheds light on why higher education seems to buffer people from cognitive declines as they age.

Learning From Mistakes Only Works After Age 12, Study Suggests
Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults.

Multiple Sclerosis Can Affect Children's IQ, Thinking Skills
Multiple sclerosis (MS) typically starts in young adulthood, but about five percent of cases start in childhood or the teen years.

When It Comes To Intelligence, Size Matters
A collaborative study led by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), McGill University has demonstrated a positive link between cognitive ability and cortical thickness in the brains of healthy 6 to 18 year olds

Cognitive Testing, Gender And Brain Lesions May Predict Multiple Sclerosis Disease Progression Risk
Cognitive testing may help people with inactive or benign multiple sclerosis (MS) better predict their future with the disease

New Light on Link between Snoring and Cognitive Deficits in Children
About two-thirds of children with sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) have some degree of cognitive deficit, but the severity of the cognitive deficit has been notoriously difficult to correlate to the severity of the SDB

Alcoholics show deficits in their ability to perceive dangerous situations
Alcoholics tend to be deficient in both cognitive and emotional processes

UCLA study shows different areas of the brain respond to belief, disbelief and uncertainty
UCLA brain imaging study suggests a neurology of belief

The memories you want to forget are the hardest ones to lose
Painful, emotional memories that people would most like to forget may be the toughest to leave behind, especially when memories are created through visual cues

Study suggests we remember the bad times better than the good
Researchers are beginning to understand why we remember events that carry negative emotional weight.

Autistic brain has fewer neurons for processing emotion
For the first time, research has shown that the autistic brain has fewer neurons in an area related to emotion and social behavior

Hearing emotion from the left
We are more likely to remember emotional words if we hear them with our left ear than our right ear.

New discoveries about neuron plasticity linked to learning and memory
Neurons experience large-scale changes across their dendrites during learning

Dopamine, uncertainty and TD learning
The authors show that when averaging the non-stationary prediction errors across trials, a ramping in the activity of the dopamine neurons should be apparent, whose magnitude is dependent on the learning rate.

Fine motor skills in South African children with symptoms of ADHD: influence of subtype, gender, age, and hand dominance
Motor problems, often characterised as clumsiness or poor motor coordination, have been associated with ADHD in addition to the main symptom groups of inattention, impulsiveness, and overactivity.

Remembering one year later: Role of the amygdala and the medial temporal lobe memory system in retrieving emotional memories
These findings clarify the role of the amygdala and the medial temporal lobe memory regions in recollection and familiarity of emotional memory after lengthy retention intervals

Memory Enhancement Drugs Show Promise But Face Growing Scrutiny
In our aging society, with an increased urgency to develop new compounds that target serious illnesses like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, memory enhancement drugs are becoming a big business.

Selective Amnesia: How A Traumatic Memory Can Be Wiped Out
American and French CNRS scientists have shown that a memory of a traumatic event can be wiped out, although other, associated recollections remain intact.