News by Subject Social & Behavior

Differences in how blood pressure affects the risk of dementia in men and women may provide clues to help slow the rapid growth of the disease, according to new research published today.

UC San Diego researchers report that medications commonly prescribed to reduce the severity of physical and mental health symptoms associated with schizophrenia may have a cumulative effect of worsening cognitive function in patients.

Despite lower exercise volume, HIIT was as effective as endurance running for improving exercise capacity and spatial memory. Researchers at the University of Tsukuba found that activity-specific physiological adaptations in the muscles and increased signaling and neurogenesis in the hippocampus underlie these improvements. Findings also suggested that benefits can potentially be optimized by tailoring exercise time and intensity.

Breathing exercises helps to better supply the brain with oxygen and helps the reticular formation to better cope with its role. When the reticular formation receives enough oxygen, it begins to better regulate the child's state of activity.

How people consume news and take actions based on what they read, hear or see, is different than how human brains process other types of information on a daily basis, according to researchers at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. While the current state of the newspaper industry is in flux, these journalism experts discovered people still love reading newspapers, and they believe a newspaper's physical layout and structure could help curators of digital news platforms enhance their users' experiences.

A new study from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and UC San Francisco's Department of Neurology combines insights from economics and psychology with decision-making experiments and fMRI brain scans to examine how our imperfect memories affect our decision making. Answering this question could hold implications for everything from conducting consumer research and crafting public policy to managing neurodegenerative diseases.

A team of researchers at the Centre for Cognitive Science at TU Darmstadt has developed a computer font that adapts its appearance based on the user's interaction with the text. "AdaptiFont" measures a user's reading speed and interactively changes the font's shape seamlessly and continuously to allow the user to read text more easily. By employing an artificial intelligence algorithm, new personalized fonts are generated on the fly in such a way that they increase an individual reader's reading speed.

You enter a room and quickly scan the crowd to gain a sense of who's there - how many men versus women. How reliable is your estimate? Not very, according to new research from Duke University. In an experimental study, researchers found that participants consistently erred in estimating the proportion of men and women in a group. And participants erred in a particular way: They overestimated whichever group was in the minority.