Cognitive Neuroscience Society

The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

Picking a new dentist or doctor can be harrowing experience. Internet reviews and word of mouth may help, but oftentimes it comes down to first impressions, maybe even just a photo online. A new study shows that these impressions of people’s competence actually affect our anticipation of pain. “The goal of this study was to […]

When babies are born, they undergo a hearing test with a simple little machine. What if one day that test could also predict how well a child will be able to read and identify those children early may need extra help? A new study has taken a crucial first step toward that possibility. In PLOS […]

Pixar’s Inside Out portrays memories as glowing individual spheres that we replay in our minds like a movie on a projector screen. But in real life, neuroscientists have found that memories are not compartmentalized into perfect little bubbles; they are represented over a largely distributed set of brain regions. And the same brain regions at […]

Often thought of in pop culture as a funny quirk (think: Cameron Diaz singing karaoke in My Best Friend’s Wedding), tone deafness is actually a brain disorder. Whereas most of us derive great pleasure from music, someone who is tone deaf may hear music as a noisy din and may even avoid situations where music […]

It’s a hot summer day and you are crammed onto a commuter train. So you may take measures to cope with the uncomfortable closeness of strangers: Perhaps you put in earbuds or read a book, or perhaps you just avoid eye contact and turn away. All of these actions change how we focus our attention […]

We all predict the future every time we listen to someone speak or read a book. If I say “barbed,” for example, what word comes next? How about “undivided”? (see answers below, along with other top word pairings) The ability to predict words helps us take mental shortcuts in language. And a new study finds […]

For one person, chocolate smells pinky and stripy, for another it was a hazy mist. These were not smell associations – the images are how some people actually experience the smell of chocolate. The people drawing the images have a rare form of synesthesia, in which a smell elicits a color. And in a new […]

Guest Post by Kathryn Gigler, Northwestern University “I believe that you believe something happened to you.” The young woman repeated the detective’s statement to me again. It had been the detective’s response to her question of whether he believed her account of the brutal sexual assault she had experienced the past weekend. As a counselor […]

Put on your shoes and jacket, then grab your lunch bag and turn off the lights – sounds simple, right? But to a 5-year-old, this multi-step process could be tricky to follow, especially if the child is distracted. What’s at play here is working memory – holding things in your mind that you can’t see. […]

Just last week, a widely publicized study came out showing that more than one-third of children under the age of 1 have used a device like a smartphone or tablet and that most children have used mobile devices by age 2. With this increased usage has come an explosion in educational apps for young children. […]

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