News by Subject Social & Behavior

MIT researchers have designed a skin-like device that can be attached to the face and measure small movements such as a twitch or a smile. With this approach, patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) could communicate a variety of sentiments with small movements that are measured and interpreted by the device.

Study by Brazilian and South African researchers is the first to prove, using a graph analysis tool, that REM dream narratives tend to be more complex and connected than reports of non-REM dreams.

Humans are not the only beings that can identify rules in complex language-like constructions -- monkeys and great apes can do so, too, a study at the University of Zurich has shown. Researchers at the Department of Comparative Language Science of UZH used a series of experiments based on an 'artificial grammar' to conclude that this ability can be traced back to our ancient primate ancestors.

The capacity for language is built upon our ability to understand combinations of words and the relationships between them, but the evolutionary history of this ability is little understood. Now, researchers from the University of Warwick have managed to date this capacity to at least 30-40 million years ago, the last common ancestor of monkeys, apes and humans.

Asif Ghazanfar led a team of scientists who determined that changing an infant monkey's verbal development also changed a physical marker of domesticity: a patch of white fur on its forehead. This is the first study linking the degree of a social trait with the size of a physical sign of domestication, in any species.