Cognitive Science

CT scans of fossilized primate skulls or skull fragments from both the Old and New Worlds may shed light on how these extinct animals moved, especially for those species without any known remains, according to an international team of researchers.

Scientists working to decode how such neurons convey information to muscles have been stymied when trying to establish a one-to-one relationship between a neuron's behavior and external factors such as muscle activity or movement velocity.

A new study has found that when we fantasize about such trips before they are possible, we tend to overlook the negatives – thus influencing our decision-making down the line.

Belief in God or other higher powers may be crucially linked to humans' cognitive ability to infer other peoples' mental states, called theory of mind or mentalizing, according to research published May 30 in the open access journal PLoS ONE.

Henry Evrard, neuroanatomist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, now discovered that the VEN occurs also in the insula of macaque monkeys. The morphology, size and distribution of the monkey VEN suggest that it is...

Klaus Armin and his research group from the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine in Gottingen have now discovered a possible mechanisms by which these glial cells in the brain can support their associated axons and keep them alive in...

Health professionals commonly say, Don't look and it won't hurt before administering an injection, but is there any scientific basis for the advice?

What genetic changes account for the vast behavioral differences between humans and other primates? Researchers so far have catalogued only a few, but now it seems that they can add a big one to the list.

Vision and hearing are so crucial to our daily lives that any impairments usually become obvious to an affected person. Although a number of known genetic mutations can lead to hereditary defects in these senses, little is known about our...

If you trust your feelings you are better able to predict future events—from the weather to the stock market, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Of course, you need to know a little about what...

In a discovery that could help instructors better teach deaf children, a team of University of Chicago researchers has found that a gesture-sign mismatch made while explaining a math problem suggests that a deaf child is experiencing a teachable moment.

A small study from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers found that online virtual communities may be an effective way to train patients in meditation and other mind/body techniques.

According to one of the leading scholars in the field, there is an emerging consensus among scientists that animals share functional parallels with humans' conscious metacognition -- that is, our ability to reflect on our own mental processes and guide...

Can animals' survival instincts shed additional light on what we know about human emotion?New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux poses this question in outlining a pioneering theory, drawn from two decades of research, that could lead to a more comprehensive...