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Stories about: learning


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How Our Brains Process Different Types of Learning

Did you know that the brain activates in different patterns when playing games with others, as opposed to when you're playing against yourself? If not, it may interest you to know that this happens because we are building a model of how our opponents and team members think and act, inside our brains. How this ca...

7 February 2012
18:01 GMT

Sea Snails and Human Memory Only Appear Unrelated

Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston (UTHealth) say that sea snails and humans are actually pretty similar when it comes to studies dealing with memories. A new research carried out by the team reveals a new way of boosting memory, which was inspired by the mollusks. The work has ...

27 December 2011
10:00 GMT

Microsoft So.cl Now Public, Promises Social Search for Learning

So.cl (pronounced “social”), previously codenamed “Tulalip,” is the latest research project that Microsoft has decided to make public. Coming from Microsoft’s FUSE Labs, the new initiative is built on Bing search programming interfaces and is focused on delivering a new learning tool f...

16 December 2011
05:56 GMT

Manipulating the Brain Can Improve Learning

Investigators from the Boston University (BU) and the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, in Kyoto, Japan, say that it may be possible to soon use a new technology for boosting visual perceptual learning, or even healing mental damage. This could be done with little or no conscious effort on the part of th...

9 December 2011
05:03 GMT

Multilingualism Benefits Children Extensively

Researchers in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge say that children who learn to speak two or more languages benefit from more advantages over their peers who only know their mother tongue. Data used for this investigation were collected by the Bilingualism Inform...

5 October 2011
05:02 GMT

New Insights into How the Brain Adapts to Routines

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) neuroscientists say that they now know more about how the brain behaves when certain tasks become routine. Their study was focused on observing how the frequency of brain waves shifts once a newly-learned task is mastered. This ability the human brain has, of diverting r...

27 September 2011
19:01 GMT

IBM Computer Chip Can Learn Pong, Might Revolutionize Gaming

A new computer chip that is being developed by technology giant IBM allows a computer to actually learn the game of Pong and the strategies that lead to victory and might have a big impact on the gaming world in the long run. The chip is called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics or SyNAP...

22 August 2011
10:31 GMT

British Education Secretary Says Video Games Can Help Learning

When it comes to politicians the customary attitude towards video games is one of distrust, with leaders often citing them as being a bad influence on children and something that needs to be regulated in the long term to limit their effects. But in a speech made to the Royal Society of London, Michael Gove, who is t...

5 July 2011
15:01 GMT

Weekend Reading: Fate of the World and Teaching Through Video Games

One of the main criticism that has been hurled at video gaming since the early '90's is that they only serve as time wasters, especially for young players, and that they do not impart any skills in return and do not teach them anything.Time wasted on video games is often pitted against the time that could b...

25 June 2011
05:31 GMT

Learning Math Is a Matter of Intuition

In a new study of the reasons that may ultimately hinder children's abilities to achieve even basic math proficiency, experts have determined that some kids simply lack an intuitive grasp of the whole concept of working with numbers. When adding this to the fact that mathematics are hard to learn and practice ev...

20 June 2011
10:01 GMT

Home Learning Boosts School Readiness

In a study focused on low-income families, researchers at the Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. determined that poor children tended to be more ready for school if they had gone through learning experiences at home with their parents. In past studies, it was demonstrated that low-income children tended to be less...

18 June 2011
06:52 GMT

Music Can Boost Creativity

Researchers in the United States are currently trying to figure out ways of integrating music with the objective of helping students be more focused and creative in learning mathematics and science. Around the world, children, adolescents and teenagers are entirely captivated by music, and carry it with them everywhe...

16 May 2011
07:47 GMT

Irrelevant Data Makes Seniors Forget Things

Scientists at the Concordia University say that one of the reasons why seniors and older adults begin to forget things is because their brains are literally cluttered with too much unimportant information. The team argues that memory loss should not be considered to be a natural function of aging. In other words, it&...

20 April 2011
09:41 GMT

Perception of Intelligence Influences Learning Patterns

A collaboration of researchers in the United States has recently determined that people tend to change their opinions about how they believe they will handle learning depending on the way they perceive intelligence in both themselves and others. These results go up against established knowledge and public wisdom, whi...

18 April 2011
10:34 GMT

Science Learning Gets Boost from Memory Retrieval

Rather than using elaborate study methods, students learning about science could boost their ability to memorize and understand various concepts related to their interests by practicing memory retrieval.In other words, experts have demonstrated that people are better at understanding science concepts if they remember...

21 January 2011
05:13 GMT

Able Kids Raise the Standard in Their Classrooms

Researchers from the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom argue in a new study that children who are smarter and more capable than their peers in the classrooms in fact raise the standards for that group, allowing the others to perform better than usual as well. The correlation holds especially true in key st...

17 December 2010
04:02 GMT

Learning and Memory Enhancer Was Discovered

A team of medical researchers from the University of Bristol have found the explanation for the interaction between brain state and the neural triggers responsible for learning.This discovery could open the way to new methods of strengthening cognitive functions in people suffering from debilitating diseases like Alz...

9 December 2010
08:48 GMT

The Molecule that Helps Us Learn

Yale scientists identified a molecule that wires brain cells and also establishes the way we learn things, and concluded this is an important step towards new ways of improving memory and maybe correcting neurological diseases.They focused on an adhesion molecule that holds synaptic junctions together, called SynCAM...

9 December 2010
04:58 GMT

Learning and Filing Information in Your Sleep

During sleep, your brain can learn a new piece of information and even store it for later, so that it pops up when you need it, found a new study carried out by researchers at the University of York and Harvard Medical School.The team also discovered that sleep helps people remember new words easier and allows them t...

2 November 2010
07:23 GMT

Understanding Human Social Skills from a Robot

University of Miami (UM) developmental psychologists and computer scientists from the University of California in San Diego (UC San Diego) are trying another approach to better understand the process of human behavior development.They are studying child-mother interactions to implement social skills in a robot that w...

29 October 2010
05:47 GMT

New ASU Institute Will Study Learning

Officials at the Arizona State University are proud to announce the Learning Sciences Institute (LSI), a new facility in which investigators from a number of disciplines will promote well-being in educational, work and family settings as well as improved learning.It wasn't until the 1990s that learning sciences ...

26 October 2010
04:24 GMT

The Brain Compensates for Losing the Amygdala

A team of investigators for the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) has recently determined that the human brain is capable of compensating for the loss of one of its regions. The group learned that the cortices of individuals who had lost a portion of the brain called the amygdala – which plays an i...

3 August 2010
04:02 GMT

Negative Stereotypes Cause Learning Disabilities

Indiana University researchers have recently concluded a thorough study on negative stereotypes, which revealed that this phenomenon causes significant repercussions in people they are addressed to. The team says subjecting people to relentless stereotyping can literally impair their ability to learn. For many years,...

27 July 2010
08:56 GMT

What Young People Want Is to Leave Home

A team of Spanish investigators has determined in a new study an interesting aspect about the relationship between antisocial behavior and goal or expectations, in teenagers. This is one of the first studies to tackle this sort of issue directly, the team behind the work says. One of the main questions the young adul...

18 June 2010
08:02 GMT

Common Learning Circuit Found in Birds and Mammals

In a new scientific study, researchers have broken new ground in their understanding of how birds and mammals may be connected evolutionarily. The investigators managed to discover that a common learning mechanism is at work in both the bird and mammalian brain, and that the same pathways are used, to some extent, in...

19 May 2010
15:01 GMT

Naps and Dreams Boost Learning

Scientists from the Harvard Medical Schools propose in a new investigation that napping after learning new information may help consolidate the recently-acquired data to memory. They add that the correlation appears to be even clearer in the case of people who dream about what they've just learned while sleeping...

24 April 2010
04:42 GMT

Learning in Children Hindered by Repeated Anesthesia

Researchers from a Swedish university have recently demonstrated a clear connection between the number of instances in which children received anesthesia and their ability to learn new things. It would appear that this cognitive function is considerably impaired by the chemical cocktails that make up anesthesia drugs...

8 March 2010
16:01 GMT

Children Trust Adults over Other Children

A recent scientific study has determined that children tend to rely in authority figures when it comes to learning something new, such as the rules of a game, rather than trusting other children their own age. The work, which was conducted by German researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropolog...

22 February 2010
08:37 GMT

Computer Games Can Teach Teachers How to Teach

Over the past few years, more and more parents have voiced criticism towards the fact that their children are spending a lot of time on their computers, rather than playing outside with their friends. But a new study shows that, in fact, the computer-game industry has managed to strike gold when it comes to making ki...

20 February 2010
05:39 GMT

Why School Performances Are Declining

Experts in Sweden were curious to learn precisely what caused average school performances to decline over the past few decades, so they conducted a study aimed at discerning the causes of this. They determined that a wide variety of factors contributed to these modifications in performances, which appeared to be more...

15 February 2010
08:31 GMT

The 'Sound of Learning' Finally Deciphered

In a find that could have massive implications for handling people suffering from speech disorders, experts at the Yale-affiliated Haskins Laboratories have determined that learning how to speak also changes the way sounds are heard in the human brain. The discovery, which is detailed in this week's issue of the...

3 November 2009
15:01 GMT

Multilingualism Has Positive Effects on Thinking

For a long time, scientists have been curious as to whether knowing more than one language has a positive effect on the brain, or if it benefits thinking patterns. A large number of studies on the issue was carried out, but the conclusions were mixed. Now, a new work done by a European Commission-appointed group brin...

19 October 2009
09:40 GMT

Sleep Tied Directly to Memory Formation

An international team of researchers, composed of experts from the Rutgers University, in Newark, the US, and the College de France, in Paris, has determined for the first time the nature of the mechanisms that take place in the human brain during sleep, which cause learning and memory to form. The scientific proof c...

16 September 2009
09:02 GMT

Cram - Study at the Speed of Light

No matter what you are studying it seems that there is never enough time to do it. And, as if you were not in enough trouble already, the object of your interest is always too complex and you cannot grasp any logical connections or you just consider it to be extremely boring, even though you must learn everything abo...

10 August 2009
01:00 GMT

Study Shows We Learn More from Success

A new study from experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Picower Institute for Learning and Memory shows that we may have more to learn from our successes than from our failures. The new research, conducted on monkeys, revealed that neurons in the brain involved in learning became a lot more fine-t...

5 August 2009
03:49 GMT

Anesthetics Not Harmful for Babies During Birth

In a new scientific study they've conducted, US experts at the Mayo Clinic have determined that subjecting mothers to anesthetics during Cesarean section surgery has no effect on the children's ability to learn later on in life. The find puts worried would-be mothers at rest, as the dangers of this type of ...

28 July 2009
09:49 GMT

Infants Get Learning Lag from Watching TV

Infants who spend a lot of time in front of the TV may set themselves up for difficulties in learning later on in life, a new scientific research shows. It would appear that even babies under 1 or 2 years of age are capable of “zoning out” in front of the screen, and that this type of behavior may tr...

2 June 2009
09:31 GMT

Alzheimer's Causes Memory 'Fuzziness' Early On

A new scientific study has uncovered the fact that Alzheimer's patients find it difficult to separate important information from less important one even early in the onset of the disease. This is a very important find, as it could help researchers get a more thorough insight into how the disease acts on the huma...

4 May 2009
06:37 GMT

Criminologists Explain Why Children Kill

Violence among children is one of the most appalling types, in that it's unconceivable for the adult mind that kids aged between 8 and 12 can exhibit such sadistic traits of aggression that they make adults shiver. Most explanations for this behavior lie within the influence of “evil,” as most people...

7 April 2009
07:01 GMT

Conceptual Learning Is the Future of A.I.

Despite the fact that, over the years, formal logic has brought robotics a long way to the point where it is now, it may be that this approach to making smarter robots might no longer be sufficient anymore. That is to say, it works fine for beating someone at chess, or for matching web pages to search queries, but it...

19 March 2009
04:55 GMT

The Unexpected Boosts Learning Abilities

University of Pennsylvania (UP) researchers have just recently released a new paper, saying that the unexpected is the actual trigger of human learning, in that people can acquire new information or new behavioral patterns if the results of their actions are not those they have foreseen. The main focus of the researc...

16 March 2009
06:55 GMT

Balancing Play and Learning in Education

Researchers from Sweden have recently published a new scientific and psychological study that again emphasizes the importance of teachers and small children getting along well, and not necessarily as individuals. Rather, the research says that kids and their instructors need to find a common language, one that would ...

11 March 2009
06:45 GMT

Computer-Assisted Learning Is the Way of the Future

The CeBIT 2009 show this year will see the presentation of a new computer-assisted learning program, one that is especially designed to meet the needs of the students and to present content in an accessible manner that will make “Crayons” one of the most appreciated such software, the producers hope. Rese...

3 March 2009
06:01 GMT

Website Designs Affect Children's Information Processing

In a new scientific study, researchers noticed that young children are heavily influenced by the layout of the Internet page they are visiting. Namely, the way in which the content of the site is structured exerts a heavy influence on the small ones' ability to process and later recall the information they see. ...

15 January 2009
09:36 GMT

YouTube Helps Math Students Pass Their Tests

The popular video-sharing website has recently gained further praise, as more and more videos detailing subjects such as math, physics, sciences and biology are starting to get posted on-line by specialists or by people who have a gift of explaining fairly complex notions very easily. Students who flunk these subject...

12 December 2008
16:01 GMT

Learn More with Microsoft Videogames

I myself confess that videogames got me interested in history and geopolitics. Old classics like Age of Empire and Colonization made me very interested in the era they take place and in the mechanisms of the worldwide political systems.Microsoft Research, together with the New York University and a consortium of othe...

8 October 2008
12:31 GMT

Mutant Flies Think Clear Even if Deprived of Sleep

It's not easy to concentrate after a long sleepless night, everybody knows that. It has been scientifically proven more than once that sleep deprivation actually decreases the activity of the brain, while after having slept, it reaches its highest levels. Washington University School of Medicine researchers have...

1 August 2008
10:48 GMT

Stupid Flies Live Longer

As it turns out it really pays to be stupid. Well, at least for flies it does. A study carried out by a team of researchers from a Swiss university revealed that dumber flies live much longer than their geeky cousins. According to the results of the study revealed today by Tadeusz Kwackei and Joep Burger at the Unive...

4 June 2008
08:39 GMT

Night Learning is Better!

It is clear that a night owl will enjoy nightlife more than a morning lark. And if they are wise, they've got all the reasons, as a team led by the postgraduate student Martin Sale from the School of Molecular and Biomedical Science at the University of Adelaide has recently discovered: daytime affects your brai...

16 August 2007
05:58 GMT

How Can a Toddler Learn the Language so Quickly?

"Oh, my God, I swear he has just said 'daddy'. He is definitely so smart!" Toddlers can impress you with learning 10 new words daily, but it appears to be quite simple for them, who must handle this vocabulary milestone to eventually reach the adult vocabulary. When being 18 months old, human offspring expe...

3 August 2007
04:14 GMT


More: next 50 >>

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