We learn from what we read and what people tell us, and we learn from our own experience. Although you would think that personal experience would easily trump other people’s advice, we in fact tend to favor abstract information against our own experience. This is seen in the way we commonly distort what we experience in ways that match what we already believe. But there is probably good reason for this tendency (reflected in confirmation bias), even if it sometimes goes wrong.

But of course individuals vary in the extent to which they persist with bad advice. A new study points to genes as a critical reason. Different brain regions are involved in the processing of these two information sources (advice vs experience): the prefrontal cortex and the striatum. Variants in the genes DARPP-32 and DRD2 affect the response to dopamine in the striatum. Variation in the gene COMT, on the other hand, affects dopamine response in the prefrontal cortex.

In the study, over 70 people performed a computerized learning task in which they had to pick the "correct" symbol, which they learned through trial and error. For some symbols, subjects were given advice, and sometimes that advice was wrong.

COMT gene variants were predictive of the degree to which participants persisted in responding in accordance with prior instructions even as evidence against their correctness grew. Variants in DARPP-32 and DRD2 predicted learning from positive and negative outcomes, and the degree to which such learning was overly inflated or neglected when outcomes were consistent or inconsistent with prior instructions.

An imaging study of 10 illiterates, 22 people who learned to read as adults and 31 who did so as children, has confirmed that the visual word form area (involved in linking sounds with written symbols) showed more activation in better readers, although everyone had similar levels of activation in that area when listening to spoken sentences. More importantly, it also revealed that this area was much less active among the better readers when they were looking at pictures of faces.

Other changes in activation patterns were also evident (for example, readers showed greater activation in the planum temporal in response to spoken speech), and most of the changes occurred even among those who acquired literacy in adulthood — showing that the brain re-structuring doesn’t depend on a particular time-window.

The finding of competition between face and word processing is consistent with the researcher’s theory that reading may have hijacked a neural network used to help us visually track animals, and raises the intriguing possibility that our face-perception abilities suffer in proportion to our reading skills.

New imaging techniques used on macaque monkeys explains why we find it so easy to scan many items quickly when we’re focused on one attribute, and how we can be so blind to attributes and objects we’re not focused on.

The study reveals that a region of the visual cortex called V4, which is involved in visual object recognition, shows extensive compartmentalization. There are areas for specific colors; areas for specific orientations, such as horizontal or vertical. Other groups of neurons are thought to process more complex aspects of color and form, such as integrating different contours that are the same color, to achieve overall shape perception.

Using a large data set of 241 brain-lesion patients, researchers have mapped the location of each patient's lesion and correlated that with each patient's IQ score to produce a map of the brain regions that influence intelligence. Consistent with other recent findings, and with the theory that general intelligence depends on the brain's ability to integrate several different kinds of processing, they found general intelligence was determined by a distributed network in the frontal and parietal cortex, critically including white matter association tracts and frontopolar cortex. They suggest that general intelligence draws on connections between regions that integrate verbal, visuospatial, working memory, and executive processes.