Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Metabolic and Physical Decline That Occurs During Aging Promoted by a DNA...

  Damage to our DNA accumulates during our aging, and Park et al. show a link between this damage and the loss of metabolic function associated with physical... Read more

  Posted on 21 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Conclusion from One of My Lectures.

  While mulling over possible topics I might develop for a next lecture, I have looked back over previous efforts on dericbownds.net and found several bits of tex... Read more

  Posted on 20 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Some Outstanding Books on the Biology of Our Behaviors.

  If you are wanting to find a humorous, fascinating, engaging, authoritative account of why we humans behave the way we do, you should immediately buy a copy of... Read more

  Posted on 19 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Watching Our Brains Construct Linguistic Phrases

  From Nelson et al.: Significance According to most linguists, the syntactic structure of sentences involves a tree-like hierarchy of nested phrases, as in the... Read more

  Posted on 16 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain-to-Brain Symmetry Tracks Classroom Interactions.

  From Dikker et al.: Highlights •We report a real-world group EEG study, in a school, during normal class activities •EEG was recorded from 12... Read more

  Posted on 15 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Mental Models Predict Emotion Transitions.

  Thornton and Tamir (open source) demonstrate that we use mental models to allow us to predict, during a currently perceived emotion in another person, the next... Read more

  Posted on 14 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Chemical Link Between Early Life Stress and Adult Schizophrenia

  A massive collaboration finds that schizophrenia-like symptoms induced by early life stress in mice correlates with expression of a DNA altering enzyme. Read more

  Posted on 13 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• You're Less Likely to Check Facts in a Social Media Crowd Than When Alone.

  Jun et al. (open source) make a stab at characterizing the societal problem of "fake" news: Significance The dissemination of unverified content (e.g. Read more

  Posted on 12 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cracking the Brain's Code for Facial Identity.

  Chang and Tsao appear to have figured out how facial identity is represented in the brain: Highlights •Facial images can be linearly reconstructed using... Read more

  Posted on 09 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Trust and the Poverty Trap.

  from Jachimowicz et al: Significance More than 1.5 billion people worldwide live in poverty. Even in the United States, 14% live below the poverty line. Read more

  Posted on 08 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Heart Trumps the Head : Desirability Bias in Political Belief Revision.

  From Tappin et al. Understanding how individuals revise their political beliefs has important implications for society. In a pre-registered study (N=900) we... Read more

  Posted on 07 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Opioids Regulate Oxytocin Enhancement of Social Attention.

  From Monte et al. work suggesting that the effectiveness of oxytocin in treating social dysfunction might be enhanced by the simultaneous administration of... Read more

  Posted on 06 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Visual Category Selectivity is Innate.

  Interesting work from Hurk et al., who find that the brains of people blind since birth show category specific activity patterns for faces, scenes, body parts,... Read more

  Posted on 05 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Preferences for Group Dominance Underlie Social Inequality and Violence Across...

  Work of Kunst et al. provided in open source text whose findings suggest that societal inequality is reflected in people’s minds as dominance motives that... Read more

  Posted on 02 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Wisdom of Crowds for Visual Search.

  Juni and Eckstein show that perceptual decisions about large image data sets (as from medical and geospatial imaging) that are made by a group are more likely t... Read more

  Posted on 01 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Listener Evaluations of New and Old Italian Violins

  From Fritz et al.: Old Italian violins are routinely credited with playing qualities supposedly unobtainable in new instruments. Read more

  Posted on 31 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Detecting Both Facial and Olfactory Cues of Sickness in Others

  From Regenbogen et al.: Significance In the perpetual race between evolving organisms and pathogens, the human immune system has evolved to reduce the harm of... Read more

  Posted on 29 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Optimal Incentives for Collective Intelligence

  Mann and Helbing devise a game-theoretic model of collective prediction showing that an antidote to groupthink and conformity is to reward those who have shown... Read more

  Posted on 26 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Solitary Discourse Yields Deeper Understanding Than Solitary Description.

  Zavals and Kuhn show that imagining a discourse between advocates of two political candidates yields a richer representation than solitary evaluation of the... Read more

  Posted on 26 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Poor Human Olfaction is a 19th-century Myth

  A review from McGann noting work that shows no anatomical basis for supposing human olfaction to be inferior to animals, although variation in the olfactory... Read more

  Posted on 25 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE