Perception News

April 19, 2024

Top Headlines

Perfect Balance: How the Brain Fine-Tunes Its Sensitivity

Apr. 18, 2024 — A sensitive perception of the environment is crucial for guiding our behavior. However, an overly sensitive response of the brain's neural circuits to stimuli can lead to neurodevelopmental disorders such as epilepsy. Researchers now report how ...

Are These Newly Found Rare Cells a Missing Link in Color Perception?

Apr. 15, 2024 — Using adaptive optics, scientists have identified elusive retinal ganglion cells in the eye's fovea that could explain how humans see red, green, blue, and ...

Paper: To Understand Cognition--and Its Dysfunction--Neuroscientists Must Learn Its Rhythms

Apr. 17, 2024 — Thought emerges and is controlled in the brain via the rhythmically and spatially coordinated activity of millions of neurons, scientists argue in a new article. Understanding cognition and its ...

Can Animals Count?

Apr. 15, 2024 — Researchers have made a groundbreaking discovery regarding number sense in animals by confirming the existence of discrete number sense in rats, offering a crucial animal model for investigating the neural basis of numerical ability and disability ...

Latest Headlines

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Everyday Social Interactions Predict Language Development in Infants

Apr. 8, 2024 — Researchers found that when the adult talked and played socially with a 5-month-old baby, the baby's brain activity particularly increased in regions responsible for attention -- and the level of ...

The Sense of Smell Is Influenced by Cues from Other Senses

Apr. 5, 2024 — The sense of smell is highly influenced by the cues from other senses, while the sense of sight and hearing are affected to a much lesser extent, shows a new ...

Body Mapping Links Our Responses to Music With Their Degree of Uncertainty and Surprise

Apr. 4, 2024 — Music holds an important place in human culture, and we've all felt the swell of emotion that music can inspire unlike almost anything else. But what ...

Researchers Map How the Brain Regulates Emotions

Apr. 3, 2024 — A new study is among the first of its kind to separate activity relating to emotion generation from emotion regulation in the human brain. The findings provide new insights that could help inform ...

Chicks Show Vision and Touch Linked at Birth

Apr. 2, 2024 — Study reveals that newly hatched chicks can instantly recognize objects with their vision, even if they've only ever experienced them by ...

How the Brain Senses Body Position and Movement

Mar. 21, 2024 — Researchers use neural networks to study proprioception, the sense the brain uses to 'know' the body's movement and ...

I Spy With My Speedy Eye: Scientists Discover Speed of Visual Perception Ranges Widely in Humans

Apr. 1, 2024 — Using a blink-and-you'll-miss-it experiment, researchers have discovered that individuals differ widely in the rate at which they perceive visual ...

A Decade of Aphantasia Research: What We've Learned About People Who Can't Visualize

Mar. 27, 2024 — People who can't visualize an image in their mind's eye are less likely to remember the details of important past personal events or to recognize ...

If Faces Look Like Demons, You Could Have This Extraordinary Condition

Mar. 22, 2024 — Imagine if every time you saw a face, it appeared distorted. Well, for those who have a very rare condition known as prosopometamorphopsia (PMO), which causes facial features to appear distorted, ...

Deciphering the Role of Bitter and Astringent Polyphenols in Promoting Well-Being

Mar. 18, 2024 — Polyphenols, abundant in fruits, vegetables, tea, and coffee, offer potential health benefits. However, owing to low bioavailability, the mechanisms ...

New Software Enables Blind and Low-Vision Users to Create Interactive, Accessible Charts

Mar. 27, 2024 — Umwelt is a new a system that enables blind and low-vision users to author accessible, interactive charts representing data in three modalities: visualization, textual description, and ...

Brain Recordings in People Before Surgery Reveal How All Minds Plan What to Say Prior to Speaking

Mar. 19, 2024 — A new study in people undergoing surgery to treat seizures related to epilepsy shows that pauses in speech reveal information about how people's brains plan and produce ...

How Neurochemicals Affect fMRI Readings

Mar. 19, 2024 — A new study shows how neurochemicals can influence blood vessels. The findings may change how researchers interpret results from functional magnetic resonance imaging ...

First Recognition of Self in the Mirror Is Spurred by Touch

Mar. 13, 2024 — Most babies begin recognizing themselves in mirrors when they are about a-year-and-a-half old. This kind of self-recognition is an important developmental milestone, and now scientists have ...

Researchers Expand Our Understanding of How the Body and Brain Communicate

Mar. 12, 2024 — Researchers investigating how exactly the brain processes the incoming stream of information from the heart and lungs, discovered that specific neurons in the thalamus are actively involved in ...

Dangers of Smell Impairment Highlighted in New Research

Mar. 11, 2024 — More than a third of people who self-identify as having a smell disorder have had at least one gas safety scare in the last five years, according to new ...

Shared Blueprint in Brain Development Across Different Functional Areas

Mar. 11, 2024 — Researchers have investigated brain development to understand how different areas of the brain become specialized in handling information such as vision, sound, touch and ...

Lack of Focus Doesn't Equal Lack of Intelligence -- It's Proof of an Intricate Brain

Mar. 8, 2024 — Imagine a busy restaurant: dishes clattering, music playing, people talking loudly over one another. It's a wonder that anyone in that kind of environment can focus enough to have a ...

How the Brain Coordinates Speaking and Breathing

Mar. 7, 2024 — Researchers discovered a brain circuit that drives vocalization and ensures that you talk only when you breathe out, and stop talking when you breathe in. This circuit is under control of a brainstem ...

Foot-Eye Coordination: How Our Vision Changes in Rhythm With Our Walking

Mar. 7, 2024 — Scientists have found our visual perception dips as our feet hit the ground. Further understanding this could help develop early diagnostics for neuromuscular or psychiatric illness; understand ...

A Noninvasive Treatment for 'Chemo Brain'

Mar. 6, 2024 — A noninvasive treatment may help to counter 'chemo brain' impairment often seen in chemotherapy patients: Exposure to light and sound with a frequency of 40 hertz protected brain cells from ...

Gaining Time in Nature -- Nature Experiences May Hold the Key to a Healthier Relationship With Time

Mar. 6, 2024 — According to a new study, there is mounting evidence that nature can help humans address the time pressure of contemporary urban lifestyles by contributing to the regulation of human sense of time. A ...

Hearing Study: Each Nerve Fiber Trains on It's Own

Mar. 6, 2024 — Axons that are regularly stimulated do not pass on increases in performance to their neighbors, study on mice ...

Older Adults Want to Express Themselves With Emojis, They Just Don't Understand How to

Mar. 6, 2024 — A new study is providing insight into how different generations are interpreting the use of emojis in their communications, with older adults unsure of how to use them as frequently as younger adults ...

Factors Associated With Age-Related Hearing Loss Differ Between Males and Females

Mar. 6, 2024 — Certain factors associated with developing age-related hearing loss differ by sex, including weight, smoking behavior, and hormone exposure, according to a new ...

Exposure to Different Kinds of Music Influences How the Brain Interprets Rhythm

Mar. 4, 2024 — The human brain appears biased toward hearing and producing rhythms with simple integer ratios, but the favored ratios can vary greatly between different societies, according to a 15-country ...

Molecular Clusters on Glial Cells Show They Are More Than Our Brain's 'Glue'

Feb. 29, 2024 — Researchers report that a single glial cell uses different molecules to communicate with different neurons. Careful clustering of these molecules ensures that the glial cell can conduct a distinct ...

In Fight Against Brain Pathogens, the Eyes Have It

Feb. 28, 2024 — The eyes have been called the window to the brain. It turns out they also serve as an immunological barrier that protects the organ from pathogens and even tumors, researchers have found. In a new ...

Pythagoras Was Wrong: There Are No Universal Musical Harmonies, New Study Finds

Feb. 27, 2024 — The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater ...

Live Music Emotionally Moves Us More Than Streamed Music

Feb. 26, 2024 — How does listening to live music affect the emotional center of our brain? A study has found that live performances trigger a stronger emotional response than listening to music from a device. ...