About memory

"The general consensus is that math anxiety doesn't affect children much before fourth grade.” New research contests that.

A rat study has found that infant males have more of the Foxp2 protein (associated with language development) than females and that males also made significantly more distress calls than females.

Evidence against an evolutionary explanation for male superiority in spatial ability coves from a review of 35 studies covering 11 species: cuttlefish, deer mice, horses, humans, laboratory mice, meadow voles, pine voles, prairie voles, rats, rhesus macaques and talastuco-tucos (a type of burrow

New findings support a mathematical model predicting that the slow, steady firing of neurons in the d

A small study of “Super Agers” has found a key difference between them and typical older adults: an unusually large

It certainly sounds like pseudo-science, but that's why we do science - because the weirdness of something is not a particularly good reason to dismiss it (quantum! many-universes!).

Preliminary findings from a small study show that older adults (68-91), after learning to use Facebook, performed about 25% better on tasks designed to measure their ability to continuously monitor and to quickly add or delete the contents of their

Autobiographical memory is an interesting memory domain, given its inextricable association with identity.

I’ve reported often on the perils of multitasking. Here is yet another one, with an intriguing new finding: it seems that the people who multitask the most are those least capable of doing so!

Recent research has suggested that sleep problems might be a risk factor in developing Alzheimer’s, and in mild cognitive impairment.

Because sleep is so important for memory and learning (and gathering evidence suggests sleep problems may play a significant role in age-related cognitive impairment), I thought I’d make quick note of a recent review bringing together all research on the immediate effects of alcohol on the sleep

I’ve talked before about how even mild head injuries can have serious consequences, and in recent years we’ve seen growing awareness of the long-term dangers of sports’ concussions (especially for

Online social networking, such as Facebook, is hugely popular. A series of experiments has explored the intriguing question of whether our memories are particularly ‘tuned’ to remember the sort of information shared on such sites.

The issue of the effect of menopause on women’s cognition, and whether hormone therapy helps older women fight cognitive decline and dementia, has been a murky one. Increasing evidence suggests that the timing and type of therapy is critical.

A new study adds more support to the idea that the increasing difficulty in learning new information and skills that most of us experience as we age is not down to any difficulty in acquiring new information, but rests on the interference from all the old information.

I’ve discussed before how hard it is to correct false knowledge.

I’ve written before about the gathering evidence that sensory impairment, visual impairment and hearing loss in particular, is a risk factor for age-related cognitive decline and dementia.

Another study looking into the urban-nature effect issue takes a different tack than those I’ve previously reported on, that look at the attention-refreshing benefits of natural environments.