News by Subject Social & Behavior

Gestures and visual animations can help reveal the cognitive origins of meaning, indicating that our minds can assign a linguistic structure to new informational content 'on the fly' -- even if it is not linguistic in nature.

A state-of-the-art brain-machine interface created by UC San Francisco neuroscientists can generate natural-sounding synthetic speech by using brain activity to control a virtual vocal tract -- an anatomically detailed computer simulation including the lips, jaw, tongue, and larynx. The study was conducted in research participants with intact speech, but the technology could one day restore the voices of people who have lost the ability to speak due to paralysis or neurological damage.

A neural network developed at MIT and elsewhere can "read" scientific research papers and generate plain-English summaries of their contents.

Estimating tweet infectivity from the first 50 retweets is the key to predicting whether a tweet will go viral, according to a new study published in PLOS ONE on April 17, 2019, by Li Weihua from Beihang University, China and colleagues.

New research exploring American liberals and conservatives shows that regardless of political affiliation, tribal instincts kick in and people's ability to think logically suffers when it comes to arguments related to their political belief systems. When confronted with the unsound reasoning of opposing groups, people become better able to identify flawed logic.

In the largest analysis to date of narrative medical school evaluations, researchers at UC San Francisco and Brown University have found significant differences in how female and underrepresented minority medical students are described.

For the first time, a team of scholars and archaeologists has recorded and interpreted Cherokee inscriptions in Manitou Cave, Alabama. These inscriptions reveal evidence of secluded ceremonial activities at a time of crisis for the Cherokee, who were displaced from their ancestral lands and sent westward on the Trail of Tears in the 1830s.

Using a statistical approach known as stylometry, which analyzes everything from the poem's meter to the number of times different combinations of letters show up in the text, a team of researchers found new evidence that Beowulf is the work of a single author.