Cognitive Science

Good news for parents: Those pricey piano lessons or random toy parts littering your floors may one day lead to the next scientific breakthrough.

How can some people resist the attraction of immediate pleasures and pursue long-term goals, while others easily succumb and compromise their ultimate expectations?

The famous ancient Greek thinker Socrates defined philosophy as melete thanatos -- 'meditation on death.' More than 2500 years later, psychologists are beginning to pick apart how the awareness of death impacts humans' cognitive functions and maybe even gives rise...

UCLA psychologists have used brain-imaging techniques to study what happens to the human brain when it slips into unconsciousness. Their research, published Oct. 17 in the online journal PLOS Computational Biology, is an initial step toward developing a scientific definition...

Egoism and narcissism appear to be on the rise in our society, while empathy is on the decline. And yet, the ability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes is extremely important for our coexistence.

Infants show strong universals as they acquire their native language, but a recent study with infants acquiring Korean also reveals that there are striking language differences.

Research published in the Journal of the Null Hypothesis suggests those who want to practice meditation and mindfulness training shouldn't jump in head first. Researchers Dan Hartnett and Alan Carr of University College Dublin found simply listening to a relatively...

A fear memory was reduced in people by exposing them to the memory over and over again while they slept. It's the first time that emotional memory has been manipulated in humans during sleep, report Northwestern Medicine scientists.

The human body is a complicated system of blood vessels, nerves, organs, tissue and cells each with a specific job to do. When all are working together, it’s a symphony of form and function as each instrument plays its intended...

A physical handicap like being tied down makes men over-estimate an opponent's size and under-estimate their own.

As anyone who has traveled with young children knows, maintaining focus on distant goals can be a challenge.

In the first study of its kind, SF State researchers have shown that younger children who use gestures outperform their peers in a problem-solving task.

The phenomenon of false memory has been well-documented: In many court cases, defendants have been found guilty based on testimony from witnesses and victims who were sure of their recollections, but DNA evidence later overturned the conviction.

A speaker's power to act on his words influences how a listener perceives the meaning of their message, according to research published July 24 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky from the University of Marburg, Germany,...

Though humans generally have a tendency to look at a region just below the eyes and above the nose toward the midline when first identifying another person, a small subset of people tend to look further down –– at the...