Blinking eyes indicate a wandering mind

April 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 30 (ANI): You tend to blink more often when you”re daydreaming or when your mind is wandering off, concludes a new study.

Cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Smilek, of the University of Waterloo, studies how people pay attention — and don”t.

For the new study, he was inspired by brain research that shows, when the mind wanders, the parts of the brain that process external goings-on are less active.

“And we thought, ok, if that”s the case, maybe we”d see that the body would start to do things to prevent the brain from receiving external information,” Smilek says. “The simplest thing that might happen is you might close your eyes more.” So, Smilek and his colleagues, Jonathan S.A. Carriere and J. Allan Cheyne, also of the University of Waterloo, set out to look at how often people blink when their mind wanders.

Fifteen volunteers read a passage from a book on a computer. While they read, a sensor tracked their eye movements, including blinks and what word they were looking at. At random intervals, the computer beeped and the subjects reported whether they”d been paying attention to what they were reading or whether their minds were wandering — which included thinking about earlier parts of the text.

The participants blinked more when their minds were wandering than when they were on task, the team reports in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“What we suggest is that when you start to mind-wander, you start to gate the information even at the sensory endings — you basically close your eyelid so there”s less information coming into the brain,” says Smilek. (ANI)

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Brain imaging technique to get inside consumers” heads developed

March 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

London, March 20 (ANI): Market researchers seem to have their prayers answered after experts” creation of a technology that will get inside the heads of consumers – literally.

Boffins have come up with neuromarketing, a brain-imaging technique that can allegedly read answers written in the brainwaves.

According to Thom Noble, managing director of Neurofocus Europe, the company running the demo, the technology addresses the biggest issue facing conventional market research.

“What people say and what they think is not always the same,” New Scientist quoted Noble as saying.

A forthcoming paper by behavioural economist Gregory Berns of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and cognitive neuroscientist Dan Ariely of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience argued neuromarketing techniques can really work in revealing information hidden to conventional methods.

But the authors also pointed out the ethical risks involved with neuromarketing, such as privacy concerns over “mind reading” and suspicion it will be used to “trick” people into buying things they don”t want or need. (ANI)

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How the brain easily deciphers motion in Japanese line drawing

March 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

London, Mar 18 (ANI): Using brain scans, scientists at Kyoto University, Japan, have found why line drawings to show “implicit motion”, used by an 18th-century Japanese artist, work so well.

Naoyuki Osaka admired line drawings by Hokusai Katsushika, and found that instead of using blur to suggest movement, as much modern art has done since the advent of photography, Katsushika created motion by drawing bodies in highly unstable positions.

And the technique is thought to work because the brain “fills in” the effects of gravity pulling the bodies down.

In earlier research it was shown that blurred photographs stimulate the same regions of the visual cortex as real-life motion, including the extrastriate visual cortex.

To discover whether sketches of unstable bodies would also activate these regions, Osaka showed Japanese students Katsushika”s drawings while scanning their brains with functional MRI.

The scans revealed that drawings depicting motion did indeed prompt activity in the extrastriate visual cortex, unlike those of people or objects in static positions. Osaka concludes that there is a “common neural pathway” for interpreting implicit motion in art that is similar to the pathway used for perceiving real-life motion.

Patrick Johnston, a cognitive neuroscientist at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, said that these findings could help “unlock how the brain processes visual information,” reports New Scientist.

However, Oron Catts of SymbioticA, a biological arts centre at the University of Western Australia in Perth, warned that the influence of culture must not be ignored.

He suggested that Japanese people may perceive the motion more vividly than people from other cultures because they are accustomed to this type of art.

“In Japanese culture, people are trained to read those cartoon images as the representation of movement,” he added. (ANI)

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Sleep can reduce mistakes in memory

September 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Sept 11 (ANI): Here’s a pointer for students flubbing multiple-choice tests: Sleep can reduce mistakes in memory, says a new study.

The first-of-its-kind study led by a cognitive neuroscientist at Michigan State University, appears in the September issue of the journal Learning and Memory.

Kimberly Fenn, principal investigator and MSU assistant professor of psychology, said: “It’s easy to muddle things in your mind.”

“This research suggests that after sleep you’re better able to tease apart the incorrect aspect of that memory,” the expert added.

To reach the conclusion, Fenn and colleagues from the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis studied the presence of false memory in groups of college students. While previous research has shown that sleep improves memory, this study is the first to address errors in memory, she said.

Study participants were exposed to lists of words and then, 12 hours later, exposed to individual words and asked to identify which words they had seen or heard in the earlier session. One group of students was trained in the morning (10 a.m.) and tested after the course of a normal sleepless day (10 p.m.), while another group was trained at night and tested 12 hours later in the morning, after at least six hours of sleep.

Three experiments were conducted, using different stimuli. In each, the students who had slept had fewer problems with false memory – choosing fewer incorrect words. (ANI)

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Why we empathise less with people of other races

July 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment

London, July 1 (ANI): People often fail to empathise with strangers’ pain, if they belong to a different race than their own, and now a study has revealed what underlies this tendency.

In an imaging study of Chinese and Caucasian people, it was found that the participants’ brains respond less strongly to the pain of strangers whose ethnicity is different when compared with strangers of their own race.

“It’s one of a string of papers that have come out in the cognitive neuroscience literature that helps us to understand some of the unfortunate ways in which racial group identity can influence our reactions to other people,” New Scientist magazine quoted Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, as saying.

In earlier research, it was shown that the amygdala, a brain area implicated in fear, responds more strongly to pictures of people whose ethnicity is different from the viewer’s, but the responses aren’t uniform.

Other research has shown that activity in other brain areas can dampen the amygdala.

In order to determine how ethnicity also sways the brain’s sense of empathy, Shihui Han and colleagues at Peking University in Beijing conducted their experiments on 17 Chinese and 16 Caucasians volunteers.

All the participants were shown videos of a person being poked in the cheek with a Q-tip cotton bud or a hypodermic syringe, while they had their brains scanned on a functional MRI machine.

The films sparked activity in a region called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which also lights up when people are in pain themselves.

But, for Chinese volunteers, the sight of another Chinese person in pain prompted more of an increase in ACC activity than the pain of a Caucasian person.

Caucasian volunteers from the US, Europe, and Israel also reacted more strongly to sight of another white person in pain.

Farah cautioned that such automatic neural responses did not necessarily translate into behaviour.

“Just because there is this difference in ACC response it doesn’t mean that we are inevitably going to behave less empathically toward the other group,” she added.

As expected, when the volunteers were asked “how painful do you think the model feels?” or “how unpleasant do you feel when observing the video clip?” Chinese and Caucasians volunteers reported that they felt each other’s pain about equally.

The study has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience.(ANI)

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Brain quicker at registering others’ physical pain than psychological

April 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 18 (ANI): The human brain reacts quickly when encountering another person’s physical pain, but compassion for psychological pain takes longer to register, a new study has found.

In the study, lead researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang in the University of Southern California and colleagues used functional MRI to analyse the brains of 13 people as they responded to stories designed to provoke a range of emotions.

Immordino-Yang reported in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that it was easy to get people’s brains to react to another person’s physical pain. All it took was a few seconds of video.

However, the brain’s response to social or psychological situations lingered for much longer. Compassion for another person’s social or psychological pain also activated some of the same brain areas triggered by compassion for physical pain, and particularly the region responsible for gut feelings, known as the anterior insula.

“That area has been implicated before in all sorts of studies about emotion, empathy and disgust,” said Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Southern California.

“We specifically set out to look at admiration because it’s a social emotion that’s important for the establishment of moral systems, and it shows people what social behaviors are valued in society,” Immordino-Yang told LiveScience.

To reach the conclusion, scientists used short stories based on real-life people to stir social emotions, such compassion for physical or social pain, or as admiration for virtue or skill.

The researchers then watched for differences in the brain’s response depending on whether the stories involved social or physical situations.

A main difference among the social emotions showed up in a central brain hub known as the posteromedial cortex, which corresponds to a person’s consciousness or sense of self. Emotions relating to physical situations activated brain systems relating to musculoskeletal control, while emotions about social or psychological situations activated the gut-related area.

“It’s almost as if we have a body in which to play out feelings about other people’s situations, but that body is subdivided between the musculoskeletal system and the gut,” Immordino-Yang noted.

Admiration for virtue showed about as strong a brain response as compassion for social or psychological pain, and the same lingering effect. But admiration for physical skill seemed to register lowest in the study. (ANI)

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Bilingual babies get an early edge – even before they can talk

April 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, April 14 (ANI): The experience of hearing two languages may give babies an early learning advantage – even before they can babble a single word, says a new study.

The study has shown that infants exposed to two languages (bilingual babies) quickly adapt to different learning cues at seven months old compared with babies from single-language households.

The findings may lead researchers to rethink how hearing two languages trains the young brain, even before babies have learned how to formulate words.

This early learning advantage may not necessarily translate into higher intelligence later on in life.

However, it does reveal that babies benefit early on from having bilingual exposure, when they themselves still babble nonsense.

“We believe that the enhancement is due more to perception at this age, rather than [language] production,” Live Science quoted Jacques Mehler, a cognitive neuroscientist at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, as saying.

For the study, Mehler and fellow researcher Agnes Kovacs recruited ‘crib bilinguals’ from families in the Trieste area of Italy, where parents spoke to infants from birth using both Italian and Slovenian mother tongues.

The researchers taught bilingual and monolingual babies to look at one side of a screen in anticipation of a visual “reward” image of a puppet, after the infants first learned to associate a sound cue with the image.

The visual treat was then switched to the other side of the screen, so that researchers could see how quickly babies would learn to switch their anticipatory look to that other side.

Bilingual babies beat out monolingual babies in three such experiments, even when the sound cues changed from nonsense syllable combinations to a structured sound cue, and then a visual cue. In all three cases, bilingual babies soon learned to switch their anticipatory attention to the other side of the screen, whereas monolingual babies never adapted.

This clearly showed a bilingual baby advantage in thinking that involved so-called executive function, which helps regulate abilities such as being able to start and stop actions.

It also indicated that having early bilingual exposure could train the mind in a more general sense, rather than just a language-specific sense as some researchers had suggested.

The study appears in the April 13 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (ANI)

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Teens’ brains not ‘fully cooked’ to listen to parents’ views

February 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

London, Feb 6 (ANI): Are you clueless as to why your teenage kid ignores home rules? Well, British scientists have got the answer: their brain’s ability to adopt the viewpoint of others is still budding.

Dubbed as the theory of mind, the ability to infer another’s perspective – emotional, intellectual, or visual -boosts with age.

To reach the conclusion, the researchers made kids watch two puppets – Sally and Anne – play with a marble, then put the marble back in a box.

Anne “left” and Sally grabbed the marble, played with it, and then returned the marble instead to a bag.

Where will Anne first search for the marble, the researchers asked the children as part of the study.

“Before four, kids say she’s going to look in the bag, but after four they know she has a false belief,” New Scientist quoted Iroise Dumontheil, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, UK, who led the new study.

However, Dumontheil said, brain scans suggest that a teenage mind toils harder when inferring the outlook of others, compared with adults.

And a brain region implicated in theory of mind, the medial prefrontal cortex, continues to develop through adolescence, the scientist added.

To see if there is a behavioural consequence of these biological changes, she and colleagues tested children, adolescents, and adults on their ability to infer the spatial perspective of another person in a simple computer game.

Volunteers- 179 females ranging in age from 7 to 27 – saw a bookshelf with a variety of different sized balls and other objects on four different rows.

Few of the objects sit in front of opaque backgrounds, obscured to someone standing on the other side of the shelf, while some sit in front of a see-through background.

Participants were asked to adopt the perspective of a man standing on the other side of the shelf and move the small ball to the left, using a mouse. In a typical test, a golf ball and tennis ball are both visible to the participant, but the golf ball is obscured from the point of view of the observer.

The correct response, then, is to move the tennis ball.

Kids under the age of 10 moved the wrong ball in about three-quarters of trials. Children aged 10 through 13 scored marginally better, and teens answered wrong on two-thirds of trials. Adults, however, did better than 50-50, on average.

The study has been published in the Journal Developmental Science. (ANI)

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