Study shows old adage ‘sleep on it’ is true – but only if it’s a really difficult problem

A new study from Lancaster University has found that sleeping on a problem really can help people to find a solution.

The study, published online this week in the journal Memory & Cognition, tested whether sleep or time spent awake worked best in helping people find the solutions to a range of problem solving tasks.

The authors of the study - Ut Na Sio, Padraic Monaghan and Tom Ormerod all from the Centre for Research in Human Development and Learning at Lancaster’s Department of Psychology - concluded that sleep facilitates problem solving but this has its primary effect for harder problems.

Professor Padraic Monaghan said: “We’ve known for years that sleep has a profound effect on our ability to be creative and find new solutions to problems. Our study shows that this sleep effect is greatest when the problems facing us are difficult. Sleep appears to help us solve problems by accessing information that is remote to the initial problem, that may not be initially brought to mind. Sleep has been proposed to ‘spread activation’ to the solution that is initially distant from our first attempts at the problem. The advice stemming from this and related research is to leave a problem aside if you’re stuck, and get some sleep if it’s a really difficult problem.”

Infants show greater unease towards computer-morphed faces when shown ‘half-mother’ images

When interacting with robots or animations with unnatural-looking faces, many people report a sense of unease. The face seems familiar yet alien, leaving the brain uncertain whether it is definitely human. To make robots more acceptable, it is necessary to understand the roots of these emotional reactions. Research from Japan has now shown that these reactions may begin in early infancy.

Yoshi-Taka Matsuda and colleagues at the Japan Science and Technology Agency, Saitama, and the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, together with scientists from The University of Tokyo and Kyoto University, studied the reactions of infants to computer-morphed photographs of faces. They showed that this unease, known as the uncanny valley effect, may begin as young as nine months, but only when the morphed image is partly developed from photographs of a familiar person—in this case, their mother. “Infants like both familiarity and novelty in objects,” explains Matsuda. “We wondered how their preference might change when they encountered objects that are intermediate between familiarity and novelty.”

The researchers used an eye-tracking system to record where and for how long the infants viewed the images. They found that the infants preferred looking at the photos of their mothers than the ‘half-mother’ morphed faces, but there was no significant difference between the times they spent looking at real and morphed photos of strangers.

Study finds that like human children, vervet monkeys learn by copying others

The new study, by Professor Andrew Whiten and Dr Erica van de Waal, shows that vervet monkeys learn by copying others in their group, as human children do.

The research found that monkeys were able to discover new techniques for obtaining food by mimicking the behaviour of others within their group. Not only that, but the same techniques then spread to other group members in the same way.

In four different groups, three different techniques spread, supporting the theory that these methods were passed on rather than learned individually.

The researchers believe vervet monkeys, like human children, are shaped by copying others and in this way come to be members of their cultural group.

Professor Whiten, Wardlaw Professor in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, commented, “Our research is revealing that primates other than humans share some of our own reliance on doing as others do in our group.”

More than Just ‘Zoning Out’ – Psychological Science Examines the Cognitive Processes Underlying Mind Wandering

It happens innocently enough: One minute you’re sitting at your desk, working on a report, and the next minute you’re thinking about how you probably need to do laundry and that you want to try the new restaurant down the street. Mind wandering is a frequent and common occurrence. And while mind wandering in certain situations – in class, for example – can be counterproductive, some research suggests that mind wandering isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

New research published in the journals of the Association for Psychological Science explores mind wandering in various contexts, examining how mind wandering is related to cognitive processes involved in working memory and executive control.

Reducing visual clutter may help Alzheimer’s patients

It’s a finding that could help Alzheimer’s patients better cope with their condition.

Psychologists at the University of Toronto and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have shown that the inability to recognize once-familiar faces and objects may have as much to do with difficulty perceiving their distinct features as it does with the capacity to recall from memory.

A study published in the October issue of Hippocampus suggests that memory impairments for people diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s disease may in part be due to problems with determining the differences between similar objects.

The research contributes to growing evidence that a part of the brain once believed to support memory exclusively – the medial temporal lobe – also plays a role in object perception.

Study links hippocampus with unconscious bias

The hippocampus is an area of the brain known to be one in which links between memories are formed, but until now it was not known that this brain region is involved in steering the brain towards making particular choices over others when faced with new decisions for which we have no previous experiences to draw on.

In a paper published in the journal Science, research psychologists G. Elliott Wimmer and Daphna Shohamy of Columbia University in New York report on their study, which used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of regions of the brain. In the study, they asked 31 volunteers to complete a three-part task while in the machine. Throughout the task their brain activity was determined by the fMRI.

The results suggest that several areas of the brain are involved in evaluating new stimuli and associating them with previous memories, but the process is strongly associated with the hippocampus.

The findings could have application, for example, in the design of new products, which could incorporate aspects of earlier products (such as color, logo or font) to stimulate the association and produce an unconscious bias towards those products over other equally new products.

The findings also suggest that misguided biases such as racism could stem from unconscious associations. (Guilt by association is a commonly known bias.) These biases have long been known, but the current study clearly shows their association with the hippocampus.

The Marshmallow Study Revisited

For the past four decades, the “marshmallow test” has served as a classic experimental measure of children’s self-control: will a preschooler eat one of the fluffy white confections now or hold out for two later?

Now a new study demonstrates that being able to delay gratification is influenced as much by the environment as by innate ability. Children who experienced reliable interactions immediately before the marshmallow task waited on average four times longer—12 versus three minutes—than youngsters in similar but unreliable situations [Video]

"Our results definitely temper the popular perception that marshmallow-like tasks are very powerful diagnostics for self-control capacity," says Celeste Kidd, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester and lead author on the study to be published online October 11 in the journal Cognition.

Testosterone increases honesty

Researchers from the University of Bonn examine the biological background of lying

Testosterone is considered THE male hormone, standing for aggression and posturing. Researchers around Prof. Dr. Armin Falk, an economist from the University of Bonn, have now been able to demonstrate that this sex hormone surprisingly also fosters social behavior. In play situations, subjects who had received testosterone clearly lied less frequently than individuals who had only received a placebo. The results have just been published in the Public Library of Science’s international online journal “PLoS ONE.”

The hormone testosterone stands for typically male attributes – it fosters the forming of the sexual characteristics, increases libido and muscle building. Women also have this sex hormone, but to a much lesser extent. “Testosterone has always been said to promote aggressive and risky behavior and posturing,” reports Prof. Dr. Bernd Weber, a neuro-scientist from the Center for Economics and Neuroscience (CENS) at the University of Bonn. More recent studies indicate, however, that this sex hormone also fosters social behavior.

(Photo: Getty Images)