News by Subject Social & Behavior

A new data-driven study from Texas A&M University casts serious doubt on the stereotype that male students perform better than female students in science -- specifically, physics.

Travellers looking to book a hotel should trust their gut instinct when it comes to online reviews rather than relying on computer algorithms to weed out the fake ones, a new study suggests.

An international team led by the SPECS Laboratory at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) has identified, for the first time in humans, the physiological mechanism responsible for the effectiveness of learning processes based on self-motivation and freedom of choice. The protagonists of this mechanism are theta-type brain waves, which regulate the ability of the human hippocampus to fix and retrieve information.

People can be different in whether they typically see the forest or the trees, but the dominant attentional mode is focusing first on the whole, and then on the details. This is the same with children. Or so it has been until now! Children of the Alpha Generation (who has been born after 2010) typically grow up with mobile devices in their hands which seems to change how they perceive the world, as Hungarian researchers showed.

Parents may fear that if their high school student isn't motivated to do well in classes, there's nothing that will change that. But a new study that followed more than 1,600 students over two years found that students' academic motivation often did change - and usually for the better. Results showed that increasing students' sense of 'belongingness' in school was one key way of increasing academic motivation.

Small changes to people's writing style can reveal which social group they "belong to" at a given moment say psychologists. Groups are central to human identity, and most people are part of multiple groups based on shared interests or characteristics - ranging from local clubs to national identity. When one of these group memberships becomes relevant in a particular situation, behaviour tends to follow the norms of this group so that people behave "appropriately".

A study of spatial learning in mice shows that exposure to new experiences dampens established representations in the brain's hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, allowing the mice to learn new navigation strategies. The study, published in Nature, was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

According to a research conducted by JCDR, at least 9 out of 10 adults suffer from low health literacy in India. Health literacy is a vital aspect of any nation's growth - be it developed, underdeveloped or a developing nation. A team of researchers lead by Ruban Nersisson, at the School of Electrical Engineering,

Over 70 million deaf people use sign languages as their preferred communication form. Although they access similar brain structures as spoken languages, it hasn't been identified the brain regions that process both forms of language equally. MPI CBS has now discovered that Broca's area in the left hemisphere, central for spoken languages, is also crucial for sign languages. This is where the grammar and meaning are processed, regardless of whether it is spoken or signed language.