In recent years cognitive scientist Marc Hauser has gathered evidence that suggests we're born with a moral instinct. This moral intuition has been likened to the universal grammar that Chomsky famously suggested underlies our linguistic abilities - certain principles are set in stone, whilst the precise parameters can be set by culture. Thousands of people from multiple countries and different r
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Published News
Path Integration in Humans
Posted by admin 5 days ago (http://thoughtfulanimal.wordpress.com)
I know you’ve all been waiting for it. We’ve talked about putting ants on stilts, kidnapping baby gerbils, and hijacking a truck full of geese. All in the name of science. Ants and gerbils taught us about the limitations of the path integration system, but also how amazingly cool it is. The geese suggested that [...]... Landau, B., Spelke, E., & Gleitman, H. (1984) Spatial kno
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How to Stop Smoking
Posted by admin 14 hours ago (http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com)
1. Don't smoke.2. See 1.This is essentially what Simon Chapman and Ross MacKenzie suggest in a provocative PloS Medicine paper, The Global Research Neglect of Unassisted Smoking Cessation: Causes and Consequences.Their point is deceptively simple: there is lots of research looking at drugs and other treatments to help people quit smoking tobacco, but little attention is paid to people who quit wi
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Let’s say that you’re preparing for an extremely important test that you and roughly 100 other classmates will be taking in a week. A few days before the test, you find out that your instructor will be going on a trip not long after the test is over and will be providing written and verbal feedback to the students within a day of the test.This is unusual, because ordinarily the instr
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Trust in the Face(width)
Posted by admin 6 days ago (http://twenty2five.blogspot.com)
It seems odd, but stable facial cues, such as the width-height ratio of a man's face, may be decent predictors of trustworthiness. Less strange is that we apparently use face-width when intuitively judging a strangers' trustworthiness...... Stirrat, M., & Perrett, D. (2010) Valid Facial Cues to Cooperation and Trust: Male Facial Width and Trustworthiness. Psychological Science,
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Masculine Deficiency, Liquid Courage, and Partner Violence
Posted by admin 9 days ago (http://ultimo167.wordpress.com)
Research by Peralta et al. (2010) into the possible reasons why some men drink to excess, and then become violent toward their partners and others. The essential role played by masculine ideals is explored. ... Peralta, R., Tuttle, L., & Steele, J. (2010) At the Intersection of Interpersonal Violence, Masculinity, and Alcohol Use: The Experiences of Heterosexual Male Perpetrators of Intim
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Brain Change Patterns in Developing Children
Posted by admin 6 days ago (http://feedproxy.google.com)
Accessibility Level: Intermediate-AdvancedWhat changes in the brain as children mature? Are there patterns in the way the changes occur? Do some regions mature more quickly than others?Last time, we talked about a paper by Schlaggar et al that examined brain differences between children and adults during a word generation task. A study published in Cerebral Cortex by Brown and colleagues...
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A number of interesting revelations to be had here, and all to do with our choices of ‘mate’.And by mate, I don’t mean the antipodean colloquialism meaning ‘friend’. Nope, I mean mate as in, you know, someone you want to shag. As it were.The first revelation in this paper* is that, for the most part, [...][Click on the hyperlinked headline for more of the goodness]
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