Scientific News
Can kindness improve our well-being?

Generally, research on prosocial behaviors has suggested that people who engage in these behaviors are likely to have better mental and even physical health than those who spend less time ...
Can we control dreams?

The research led by Adam Haar Horowitz (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT) aimed to demonstrate the possibility of manipulating people’s dreams during the first phase of sleep via an electronic device. This first phase ...
Do infants like being imitated?

For babies, the theoretical benefits of being imitated has been widely touted. Imitation by adults encourages the development of socio-cognitive skills, including self-awareness, theory of mind (understanding the intentions and mental states of others) and the acquisition of cultural norms. But as the authors of this study ...
Are babies altruistic?

For the moment, only humans have been shown to offer food to someone in need even when the giver himself may need it. Of course, in many circumstances, bonobos will share food, but they will not spontaneously give a valuable ...
If we know the right choice, why don’t we always make it?

As Ian Krajbich, one of the study’s co-authors explains, the study was designed to explore “this tension between doing what you should do, at least from ...
Can a person's empathy by predicted?

Empathy is based in part on the brain’s ability to reflexively and unconsciously process the experiences of others, whether observed or inferred, the same way we do for ourselves; a phenomenon known as “neural ...
Do parrots control probability?

Doctoral student Amalia Bastos and Professor Alex Taylor (the authors of the study) developed a three-part protocol to demonstrate that the parrots are able to draw logical inferences from the different types of ...
Is power masculine or feminine according to young children?

The researchers at the Institute for Cognitive Sciences - Marc Jeannerod (CNRS/Claude Bernard University Lyon 1) in collaboration with the Universities of Oslo (Norway), Lausanne and Neuchatel (Switzerland) conducted three experiments.
In the first, they showed an image of two non-gendered figures to over 400 children (ages 4 to 6) in ...
Can the brains of adults and babies synchronize?

As the authors of this research point out, most of the earlier studies on so-called “neural coupling” were done with adults (for example, when watching movies together). Elise A. Piazza (from the Princeton ...
Fake news: can we create our own misinformation?

Jason C. Coronel (a professor of communications at Ohio State University), Shannon Poulsen, and Matthew Sweitzer (all doctoral students at Ohio State) carried out a two-part study in order to shed light on the role of digital facts in misinformation and how it is spread.
In the ...
Can dogs encourage kids to read?

Camille Xinmei Rousseau (a doctoral student at British Columbia Okanagan, Canada) and Christine Yvette Tardif-Williams (Professor at Brock University Saint Catharines, Canada) investigated whether dogs could ...
Can board games help preserve cognitive function?

Among the various types of interventions that could potentially promote “successful cognitive aging,” scientists have already shown that enjoyable activities, like cards, crosswords, and sudoku can have ...
Neuroplasticity: does playing the drums change the brain?

As a preamble to the study, the authors indicate that for the past 5,000 years, over all continents, there has been a constant ratio of 90% right-handed to 10% left-handed people. Each hand is controlled by the contralateral motor cortex. The ...
A driver’s license for rats?

While the behavioral tasks generally used to assess cognitive processes provide interesting information, they tend to be overly simple and do not reflect the animal’s real cognitive potential. This is why the scientists in the present study wanted to assess behaviors that allow for the observation of various responses. According ...
Is a well-wrapped present better appreciated?

According to Jessica M. Rixom, a co-author of this study and professor of marketing at the University of Nevada, Reno: “When we receive a gift from a friend, we use the wrapping as a cue about the gift inside and form expectations […] If it's wrapped neatly, we set high expectations, and it's ...
Can babies understand numbers before they learn to count?

Lisa Feigenson, a specialist in child number development, and Jenny Wang, both from Johns Hopkins University, observed 14 to 18-month old babies in a simple experiment. They showed the babies toys (small cars or dog figurines), which they ...
How quickly can our brain recognize a familiar song?

As a preamble to their research, the scientists from the Ear Institute (University College London) point out that research has shown that the concept of musical familiarity is based largely on traces of long-term memory ...
Can garlic save your memory?

Neuroscience in conjunction with microbiology has shown that there is indeed permanent communication between our gut and our brain. There are 200 million neurons in our large intestine connected to our brain through the vagus ...
Is optimism one of the keys to longevity?

Work on exceptional longevity has so far often focused on biomedical factors while the positive influence of psychosocial factors on healthy aging remains much less clear. This is what motivated Lewina O Lee and her colleagues to study the possible effects of optimism on longevity. They hypothesized that (very) optimistic people would live longer. To test this, they relied on data from two ...
Do brief but intense physical efforts improve brain function?

Various scientific publications have reported the benefits of physical exercise on neuronal activity, including improved learning and memory, through short and long-term changes in synaptic plasticity. Indeed, the dentate gyrus is particularly important as an entry step for coding contextual and spatial information from several brain areas. ...