New University of Waterloo research that examined people’s smartphone habits as well as their analytical, verbal, and numeracy skills found an association between heavy smartphone use and lowered intelligence. The three studies, appearing in the journalComputers in Human Behavior, suggest that having convenience at our fingertips is making it easy for us to avoid thinking […]
It turns out that offsetting the music soundtrack of TV adverts by an imperceptible amount makes the adverts significantly more memorable in viewers’ minds. Researcher Andy Rogers, from the University of Huddersfield (UK), detailed his discovery at the International Computer Music Association’s 2014 conference, held in Athens. “The audience at the conference were very interested […]
Human and chimpanzee genomes are 99 percent the same, but clearly, that 1 percent difference is hugely significant. Exactly why our mental and linguistic capabilities are so far ahead of our chimp cousins now looks closer to being explained, thanks to a new study in the journal Human Mutation. It shows that a certain form […]
The ability to reflect on one’s knowledge was thought of as an exclusively human ability, but it seems that other primates can engage in meta-cognition as well, say researchers from Columbia’s Primate Cognition Laboratory. The work, detailed in Psychological Science, was designed to show that a monkey could express its confidence in its answers to […]
New experiments have revealed that elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, an important indicator of self-recognition that places them in an elite group that includes humans, dolphins and great apes. Mirror self-recognition is thought to relate to empathetic tendencies and the ability to distinguish oneself from others, a characteristic that evolved independently in several […]
