By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Heart failure can take a heavy psychological toll, with many patients developing symptoms of depression. But a new study suggests that an exercise plan can ease the melancholy, creating improvements in mood that are comparable to the effects seen with medication. For roughly a year, researchers followed more than 2,000 people treated for congestive heart failure at 82 medical centers in the United States, France and Canada. Those who were assigned to a moderate aerobic exercise program — about 90 to 120 minutes a week — saw greater reductions in symptoms of depression than those who were not enrolled in such a program. “I think this shows that for patients who have heart failure, exercise is certainly an excellent treatment,” said Dr. James A. Blumenthal, a professor of medical psychology at Duke University Medical Center and the lead author of the study, which was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. “It’s something that most patients can engage in. It results in improved cardiorespiratory fitness, they have more stamina, and now we see that not only do they derive these physical benefits, but they also derive psychological benefits as well.” An estimated five million Americans are living with heart failure, with more than half a million new cases diagnosed each year. Patients often experience a drastic decline in their physical abilities, and with it a blow to their mental health. Up to 75 percent of patients develop some symptoms of depression, with about 40 percent suffering from full-blown clinical depression, which can worsen their overall prognosis. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 17111 - Posted: 08.01.2012

By Winnie Yu If you want to keep your cool, you might want to pass up those greasy wings and gooey dessert. A new study from the University of California, San Diego, suggests that people whose diets are higher in trans fats are more prone to aggression. Trans fats, or hydrogenated oils, have made the news in recent years because studies have strongly linked them to heart disease and cancer, and some locales have passed laws restricting their use. They are still common, however, in restaurant food and many grocery items. Beatrice Golomb, a physician and associate professor of medicine at U.C. San Diego, wondered if trans fats might affect behavior, after noting how they interact with a type of healthy fat. Past studies found that docosahexaenoic acid—or DHA, a long-chain omega-3 fatty acid—has a calming, antidepressant effect. Trans fats disrupt the chemical process that leads to the conversion of fatty acids into DHA, which led Golomb to suspect that trans fats might be linked to aggression. Her study, which was published in March in PLoS ONE, involved 1,018 men and women older than 20 who filled out a food questionnaire and several other surveys that measure impatience, irritability and aggression. Even after considering other influences, Golomb's team found a strong link between the intake of trans fats and aggression. “Trans-fatty acids were a more consistent predictor of aggression than some traditional risk factors such as age, male sex, education and smoking,” Golomb says. The findings were consistent across both sexes and across all ages, ethnicities and socioeconomic groups. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 17110 - Posted: 08.01.2012

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Two groundbreaking new studies address the irksome question of why so many of us who work out remain so heavy, a concern that carries special resonance at the moment, as lean Olympians slip through the air and water, inspiring countless viewers to want to become similarly sleek. And in a just world, frequent physical activity should make us slim. But repeated studies have shown that many people who begin an exercise program lose little or no weight. Some gain. To better understand why, anthropologists leading one of the new studies began with a research trip to Tanzania. There, they recruited volunteers from the Hadza tribe, whose members still live by hunting and gathering. Providing these tribespeople with a crash course in modern field-study technology, the researchers fitted them with GPS units, to scrupulously measure how many miles each walked daily while searching for food. They also asked them to swallow so-called doubly labeled water, a liquid in which the normal hydrogen and oxygen molecules have been replaced with versions containing tracers. By studying these elements later in a person’s urine, researchers can precisely determine someone’s energy expenditure and metabolic rate. The researchers gathered data for 11 days, then calculated the participants’ typical daily physical activity, energy expenditure and resting metabolic rates. They then compared those numbers with the same measures for an average male and female Westerner. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17109 - Posted: 08.01.2012

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD In the widening search for the origins of modern human evolution, genes and fossils converge on Africa about 200,000 years ago as the where and when of the first skulls and bones that are strikingly similar to ours. So this appears to be the beginning of anatomically modern Homo sapiens. But evidence for the emergence of behaviorally modern humans is murkier — and controversial. Recent discoveries establish that the Homo sapiens groups who arrived in Europe some 45,000 years ago had already attained the self-awareness, creativity and technology of early modern people. Did this behavior come from Africa after gradual development, or was it an abrupt transition through some profound evolutionary transformation, perhaps caused by hard-to-prove changes in communication by language? Now, the two schools of thought are clashing again, over new research showing that occupants of Border Cave in southern Africa, who were ancestors of the San Bushmen hunter-gatherers in the area today, were already engaged in relatively modern behavior at least 44,000 years ago, twice as long ago as previously thought. Two teams of scientists reported these findings Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Since this early date for the San culture is close to when modern humans first left Africa and reached Europe, proponents of the abrupt-change hypothesis took the findings as good news. Richard G. Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford University, said in an e-mail from South Africa that the new evidence “supports my view that fully modern hunter-gatherers emerged in Africa abruptly around 50,000 years ago, and I remain convinced that the behavior shift, or advance, underlies the successful expansion of modern Africans to Eurasia.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 17108 - Posted: 07.31.2012

By Dan Hurley, New studies are raising the hope of finding a pill to improve the intellectual abilities of people with Down syndrome. One study, published online by the journal Translational Psychiatry, is the first ever to show that a drug might improve the verbal memory of people with the disorder. Although the benefits appeared modest and the study was small, Down syndrome experts meeting last week in Washington called it a major development after more than a decade of research in mice and test tubes. “A lot of us are well aware of progress we’ve seen . . . in the past five to 10 years,” said Jamie Edgin, a developmental psychologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Among those advances, she said, are tests designed to measure the cognitive abilities of people with Down syndrome. The development of mice with the genetic equivalent of Down syndrome, essential for studies of possible drug treatments, has been another milestone. “There’s a lot of excitement,” Edgin said. The drug used in the recent study, Namenda, is approved for treating Alzheimer’s disease. Although it has shown only a slim and temporary benefit for that condition, a 2007 study of mice with the genetic equivalent of Down syndrome showed that it almost entirely normalized their ability to learn and remember. The effects in humans appeared far less striking. Alberto Costa, a physician and neuroscientist at the University of Colorado in Denver, ran a test involving 42 young adults with Down syndrome, half of whom received a placebo. After 16 weeks, most of the people who received Namenda performed better on tests of memory than they had at the beginning of the study. But the effect was statistically significant on only one of the 14 tests, which some researchers at last week’s meeting said they considered disappointing. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17107 - Posted: 07.31.2012

The cause of a type of hereditary blindness has been traced to a genetic mutation, a discovery that potentially opens a new treatment approach, Canadian and international researchers say. The inherited eye disease, called Leber congenital amaurosis, usually shows its first signs at birth or in the months following. It affects about one in 80,000 newborns. About 1,000 Canadians live with the effects. The researchers' genetic discovery helps provide families with a firm diagnosis, Robert Koenenkoop says.The researchers' genetic discovery helps provide families with a firm diagnosis, Robert Koenenkoop says. (CBC) Scientists at Montreal's McGill University and their co-authors have identified that a gene called NMNAT1 can cause LCA. "We're getting closer to finding 100 per cent of the genes causing Leber congenital amaurosis," said Dr. Robert Koenekoop, director of the McGill Ocular Genetics Laboratory, who led the research team. "That gives an immediate relief to the families, because it confirms the diagnosis [and] gives you a treatment avenue." The disease was considered untreatable, but that is no longer the case for some subtypes, Koenekoop said. For the study in this week's issue of Nature Genetics, scientists analyzed the genomes of 60 infants with LCA of unknown cause. They discovered a mutation on the NMNAT1 gene, which is found in all human cells. It produces a coenzyme called NAD that is involved in hundreds of reactions. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Vision; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17106 - Posted: 07.31.2012

by Amy West Many deep-sea squid dispel an ink cloud to flee a predator, but one species goes a step farther: It ensures a getaway by counterattacking and then ditching the tips of its arms. These detached bits can continue to twitch and emit bioluminescent light—likely providing a vital distraction. By catching this strange maneuver on camera, scientists have established Octopoteuthis deletron as the only known squid to drop portions of its arms in self-defense, much as lizards drop their tails before escaping. O. deletron inhabits depths of 500 to 600 meters. Little is known about the biology of these gelatinous deep-dwellers, but recently they have begun to yield their secrets—including some bizarre mating behavior—thanks to powerful video cameras mounted on robotic submersibles operated by researchers at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, California. Viewing some of this footage, Stephanie Bush, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, noticed many individuals with arms of different lengths, and suspected that these cephalopods lost their arms during an attack. To investigate, Bush collaborated with researchers at MBARI. With a bit of luck, the team found squid off the coast of California, and tried poking them with the control arm of the submersible. The creatures attacked the vehicle but never held on, perhaps because they couldn't grip its smooth metal surface, Bush says. Eventually, the researchers resorted to attaching the bottle-brush they used to wash their laboratory glassware to the submersible. When they nudged the next squid they encountered, the squid attacked the brush and immediately left behind parts of two arms. Fortunately the team caught the action with a high-resolution camera (see video). As the scientists erupted into cheers in the control room, Bush says she wondered why she hadn't tried this earlier. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 17105 - Posted: 07.30.2012

by Kai Kupferschmidt Tabloid journalists have long known that you can discover dirty secrets by going through people's garbage. Now, researchers have done something similar in the name of science, albeit on a grander—and smellier—scale. They have analyzed the sewage of 19 European cities to find out how much of certain illicit drugs people in those cities consume. "The technique needs further work and validation, but this paper shows that it is a feasible approach for estimating drug use on a large scale," says Fritz Sörgel, head of the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg, Germany, who was not involved in the work. To put figures on illicit drug use, researchers routinely use surveys, supplemented by data from police and customs. But they have been pushing for more accurate and objective methods to estimate the amounts consumed. One possibility is to sample the sewage of a city and look for chemical traces of the drugs themselves or metabolites created when a drug passes through the human body. "The surveys tell you what people take, but not how much, not how big the market is," says Kevin Thomas, a toxicologist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research in Oslo and one of the authors of the new paper. "Sewage tells you that." During one week in March 2011, Thomas and colleagues collected daily samples representing 24 hours of sewage flow from 21 sewage treatment plants in 19 cities across Europe—from Antwerp to Zagreb. The samples were analyzed for traces of five different drugs by local labs according to a fixed protocol. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17104 - Posted: 07.30.2012

Shift workers are slightly more at risk of having a heart attack or stroke than day workers, research suggests. An analysis of studies involving more than 2m workers in the British Medical Journal said shift work can disrupt the body clock and have an adverse effect on lifestyle. It has previously been linked to an increased risk of high blood pressure and diabetes. Limiting night shifts would help workers cope, experts said. The team of researchers from Canada and Norway analysed 34 studies. In total, there were 17,359 coronary events of some kind, including cardiac arrests, 6,598 heart attacks and 1,854 strokes caused by lack of blood to the brain. These events were more common in shift workers than in other people. The BMJ study calculated that shift work was linked to a 23% increased risk of heart attack, 24% increased risk of coronary event and 5% increased risk of stroke. But they also said shift work was not linked to increased mortality rates from heart problems and that the relative risks associated with heart problems were "modest". The researchers took the socioeconomics status of the workers, their diet and general health into account in their findings. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Stress
Link ID: 17103 - Posted: 07.30.2012

By RODNEY MUHUMUZA KITGUM, Uganda — Augustine Languna's eyes welled up and then his voice failed as he recalled the drowning death of his 16-year-old daughter. The women near him looked away, respectfully avoiding the kind of raw emotion that the head of the family rarely displayed. "What is traumatizing us," he said after regaining his composure, "is that the well where she died is where we still go for drinking water." Joyce Labol was found dead about three years ago. As she bent low to fetch water from a pond a half mile from Languna's compound of thatched huts, an uncontrollable spasm overcame her. The teen was one of more than 300 young Ugandans who have died as a result of the mysterious illness that is afflicting more and more children across northern Uganda and in pockets of South Sudan. The disease is called nodding syndrome, or nodding head disease, because those who have it nod their heads and sometimes go into epileptic-like fits. The disease stunts children's growth and destroys their cognition, rendering them unable to perform small tasks. Some victims don't recognize their own parents. Ugandan officials say some 3,000 children in the East African country suffer from the affliction. Some caregivers even tie nodding syndrome children up to trees so that they don't have to monitor them every minute of the day. Beginning Monday, Uganda hosts a four-day international conference on nodding syndrome that health officials believe will lead to a clearer understanding of the mysterious disease. © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Epilepsy
Link ID: 17102 - Posted: 07.30.2012

By Laura Sanders A baby’s brain is a thirsty sponge, slurping up words, figuring out faces and learning which foods are good and bad to eat. Information about the world flooding into a young brain begins to carve out traces, like rushing water over soft limestone. As the outside world sculpts the growing brain, important connections between nerve cells become strong rivers, while smaller unused tributaries quietly disappear. In time, these brain connections crystallize, forming indelible patterns etched into marble. Impressionable brain systems that allowed a child to easily learn a language, for instance, go away, abandoned for the speed and strength that come with rigidity. In a fully set brain, signals fly around effortlessly, making common­place tasks short work. A master of efficiency, the adult brain loses the exuberance of childhood. But the adult brain need not remain in this petrified state. In a feat of neural alchemy, the brain can morph from marble back to limestone. The potential for this metamorphosis has galvanized scientists, who now talk about a mind with the power to remake itself. In the last few years, researchers have found ways to soften the stone, recapturing some of the lost magic of a young brain. “There’s been a very, very significant change,” says Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “I don’t think the import of that basic fact has fully expressed itself.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17101 - Posted: 07.28.2012

by Michael Slezak Despite the fact that women live longer than men, their brains seems to age faster. The reason? Possibly a more stressful life. When people age, some genes become more active while others become less so. In the human brain, these changes can be observed through the "transcriptome" – a set of RNA molecules that indicate the activity of genes within a population of cells. When Mehmet Somel, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues compared the transcriptome of 55 male and female brains of different ages, they were surprised to find that the pattern of gene activation and deactivation that occurs with ageing appeared to progress faster in women than in men. This was particularly apparent in an area of the pre-frontal cortex. "This was just the opposite of what we'd originally expected," says Somel, who was at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences in China when he did the research. He says that given the fact that females have a longer lifespan, they had expected to see slower or later ageing-related changes in their brain. "But it fits everyday observations on ageing. Not all organs within an individual age at the same rate," he says. Somel's team compared the expression of more than 13,000 genes in four brain regions. In one region – the superior frontal gyrus – they found 667 genes that were expressed differently in men and women during ageing. Of those, 98 per cent were skewed towards faster ageing in women. Some of these gene changes have previously been linked to general cognitive decline and degenerative disease. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Stress; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17100 - Posted: 07.28.2012

By Jason G. Goldman The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space. There is no other reason than this why “the hand I touch and see coincides spatially with the hand I immediately feel.” This passage, so often quoted in introductory psychology textbooks, was written by William James in his 1890 volume Principles of Psychology, and it encapsulates the dominant viewpoint of developmental psychology for most of the history of the field. James wasn’t the first one to articulate the idea that babies are born knowing essentially nothing of the world, of course. In 1689, John Locke wrote, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper [tabula rasa] void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this, I answer, in one word, from experience. John Locke (1632-1704) The argument proposed by philosophers like Locke and theorists like James is that babies are born as “blank slates,” ready to be inscribed upon – by experience, by learning, by culture. Infants, they argue, are equipped with basic sensory mechanisms, like vision and touch, and a powerful statistical brain that is highly skilled at detecting and learning associations between those sensory inputs. Throughout development, or so the argument goes, children learn more and more associations until their minds become more like adult minds. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17099 - Posted: 07.28.2012

by Andy Coghlan Treating disease by stimulating brain cells with light is a step closer to reality following the first demonstration that the technique can improve mental performance in monkeys. Two monkeys performed better on simple computer tasks after light was used to boost the activity of brain cells necessary for the task. "For the first time, we were able to change behaviour in primates with our technique," says Wim Vanduffel of Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown, who is head of the group that performed the experiment. Known as optogenetics, the method has the potential to treat conditions such as epilepsy, where the light could temporarily deactivate the brain cells that cause seizures, or Parkinson's disease, where it can activate cells that make dopamine, the neurotransmitter vital for controlling mobility that those with Parkinson's lack. Previously, it has been used in nematode worms to trigger them to lay eggs, and mice to relieve depression and paralysis. Researchers have also used it in monkeys, but only on single, isolated neurons. Vanduffel and his colleagues wanted to see if they could extend this to entire networks of cells, boosting a monkey's ability to perform a simple computer-based task. Natural performance enhancers First, Vanduffel's team scanned the two monkeys' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they followed a green dot on a computer screen. From the scans, the researchers could tell that the monkeys relied on an area of the brain called the arcuate sulcus to do the task. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 17098 - Posted: 07.28.2012

Monya Baker Last week, the Sacramento Bee reported that two neurosurgeons at the University of California, Davis, had been banned from research on humans after deliberately infecting three terminally ill cancer patients with pathogenic bacteria in an attempt to treat them. All three died, two showing complications from the infection. Nature explores what happened and the science behind it. Who authorized the researchers to infect the patients? All three patients consented to infection. However, anyone testing experimental drugs in the United States requires approval from their university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) and oversight by the country's Food and Drug Administration (FDA), both of which review evidence for safety and efficacy. Neurosurgeons Paul Muizelaar and Rudolph Schrot at the University of California (UC), Davis, did not obtain this approval; they say they did not think it was required. Harris Lewin, the vice-chancellor of research at UC Davis, wrote a letter to the FDA describing what had occurred as “serious and continuing noncompliance”. In 2008, working under instructions from Muizelaar, Schrot asked the FDA about the possibility of deliberately infecting a postoperative wound in a particular patient with glioblastoma with the bacterium Enterobacter aerogenes. He was told that animal studies were needed first. Muizelaar did not infect that patient, but arranged for a graduate student to begin tests in rats. Although bacteria were purchased as research materials not to be used in humans, they were eventually used in three other patients with glioblastoma. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Glia
Link ID: 17097 - Posted: 07.28.2012

By Laura Sanders Light use of the club drug Ecstasy may cause subtle memory deficits. People who popped just three Ecstasy tablets a month over the course of a year saw their memory slip on a laboratory test, scientists report online July 25 in Addiction. The new results offer some of the best evidence yet that the drug can change the brain, says psychiatric neuroscientist Ronald Cowan of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. “It’s been very, very difficult to convince people that there’s a causative effect of the drug,” he says. “This adds strong evidence to that.” Scientists debate whether Ecstasy, a drug that brings euphoria, boundless energy and heightened sensory experiences, can actually harm the brain in part by screwing with cells that produce the chemical messenger serotonin. Past studies have been notoriously hard to interpret because brain differences seen between Ecstasy users and nonusers could have existed long before the drug use began. And people who use Ecstasy frequently tend to use other drugs too, making it hard to tease out Ecstasy’s effect. For the study, Daniel Wagner of the University of Cologne in Germany and his colleagues wanted to catch people as they started using Ecstasy. The team recruited 149 people who had used Ecstasy five or fewer times and ran the subjects through a battery of brain tests looking for signs of mental deficits. One year later, the team retested 43 people who had not used Ecstasy since being recruited, and 23 who had used 10 or more Ecstasy pills in that time. These people reported using an average of 33.6 tablets. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17096 - Posted: 07.28.2012

by Andy Coghlan, Cambridge, UK IT'S early evening, and I'm facing a dilemma of some delicacy - whether or not to break wind. Let me explain... I'm poised to be voluntarily trapped in a room for the night as part of research to find new treatments for obesity at the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, UK. The aim of the experiment is to see if brown fat, a special type of fat tissue that turns energy obtained from food into heat, can be coaxed into burning more unwanted white fat than usual. They intend to do this using a simple food supplement - a daily capsule of spicy ingredients such as chilli pepper or cinnamon - aimed at mimicking the effects of being in the cold. Recruited as a control, I've spent the afternoon undergoing a battery of tests to serve as reference data for how people in reasonably good health burn energy. Investigator Andy Whittle at the University of Cambridge explains that comparisons with this data will help establish whether people burn more energy than normal when kept in the cold (at 18 °C for 2 hours) or when given the spicy food capsules. I will be confined to a special room for the night, which serves as a human-scale calorimeter. "We'll treat you as if you're a fire, measuring how much oxygen you take in and how much carbon dioxide you breathe out," says Peter Murgatroyd, who designed the calorimeter. In other words, they will be capturing everything that goes in and out of my body. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17095 - Posted: 07.28.2012

By Helen Briggs BBC News The idea that exercise is more important than diet in the fight against obesity has been contradicted by new research. A study of the Hadza tribe, who still exist as hunter gatherers, suggests the amount of calories we need is a fixed human characteristic. This suggests Westerners are growing obese through over-eating rather than having inactive lifestyles, say scientists. One in 10 people will be obese by 2015. And, nearly one in three of the worldwide population is expected to be overweight, according to figures from the World Health Organization. The Western lifestyle is thought to be largely to blame for the obesity "epidemic". Various factors are involved, including processed foods high in sugar and fat, large portion sizes, and a sedentary lifestyle where cars and machines do most of the daily physical work. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17094 - Posted: 07.28.2012

By JOHN MONTEROSSO and BARRY SCHWARTZ ARE you responsible for your behavior if your brain “made you do it”? Often we think not. For example, research now suggests that the brain’s frontal lobes, which are crucial for self-control, are not yet mature in adolescents. This finding has helped shape attitudes about whether young people are fully responsible for their actions. In 2005, when the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional, its decision explicitly took into consideration that “parts of the brain involved in behavior control continue to mature through late adolescence.” Similar reasoning is often applied to behavior arising from chemical imbalances in the brain. It is possible, when the facts emerge, that the case of James E. Holmes, the suspect in the Colorado shootings, will spark debate about neurotransmitters and culpability. Whatever the merit of such cases, it’s worth stressing an important point: as a general matter, it is always true that our brains “made us do it.” Each of our behaviors is always associated with a brain state. If we view every new scientific finding about brain involvement in human behavior as a sign that the behavior was not under the individual’s control, the very notion of responsibility will be threatened. So it is imperative that we think clearly about when brain science frees someone from blame — and when it doesn’t. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 17093 - Posted: 07.28.2012

by Michael Balter Many children (and adults) have heard Aesop's fable about the crow and the pitcher. A thirsty crow comes across a pitcher partly filled with water but can't reach the water with his beak. So he keeps dropping pebbles into the pitcher until the water level rises high enough. A new study finds that both young children and members of the crow family are good at solving this problem, but children appear to learn it in a very different ways from birds. Recent studies, particularly ones conducted by Nicola Clayton's experimental psychology group at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom have shown that members of the crow family are no birdbrains when it comes to cognitive abilities. They can make and use tools, plan for the future, and possibly even figure out what other birds are thinking, although that last claim is currently being debated. A few years ago, two members of Clayton's group showed that rooks can learn to drop stones into a water-filled tube to get at a worm floating on the surface. And last year, a team led by Clayton's graduate student Lucy Cheke reported similar experiments with Eurasian jays: Using three different experimental setups, Cheke and her colleagues found that the jays could solve the puzzle as long as the basic mechanism responsible for raising the water level was clear to the birds. To explore how learning in children might differ from rooks, jays, and other members of the highly intelligent crow family, Cheke teamed up with a fellow Clayton lab member, psychologist Elsa Loissel, to try the same three experiments on local schoolchildren aged 4 to 10 years. Eighty children were recruited for the experiments, which took place at their school with the permission of their parents. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 17092 - Posted: 07.26.2012