News by Subject Social & Behavior

If you're a bit more forgetful or having more difficulty processing complex concepts than in the past, the problem may be your menopause stage. A new study claims that menopause stage is a key determinant of cognition and, contrary to previous studies, shows that certain cognitive declines may continue into the postmenopause period. Study results are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS).

MIT neuroscientists shed new light on how the timing of a memory is encoded in the hippocampus, and suggest that time and space are encoded separately.

A unifying explanation of the cause of autism and the reason for its rising prevalence has eluded scientists for decades, but a theoretical model published in the journal Medical Hypotheses describes the cause as a combination of socially valued traits, common in autism, and any number of co-occurring disabilities.

Could the merging of humor and news actually help inform the public? New research from the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania and the School of Communication at Ohio State University found that young people were more likely to remember information about politics and government policy when it was conveyed in a humorous rather than non-humorous manner. They were also more willing to share the information online.

What feels like up may actually be some other direction depending on how our brains process our orientation, according to psychology researchers at York University's Faculty of Health. In a new study published in PLoS One, researchers at York University's Centre for Vision Research found that an individual's interpretation of the direction of gravity can be altered by how their brain responds to visual information.

Researchers observed slow spontaneous fluctuations in the brain's visual centers that preceded visual hallucinations in blind people.

Noncognitive skills and cognitive abilities are both important contributors to educational attainment and lead to success across the life course, according to a new study from an international team. The research provides evidence for the idea that inheriting genes that affect things other than cognitive ability are important for understanding differences in people's life outcomes. Until now there had been questions about what these noncognitive skills are and how much they matter for life outcomes.