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"This research is a first attempt to shed light on important, but understudied, adverse consequences of gender inequality on women's health in later life," explains researcher Eric Bonsang of University Paris-Dauphine and Columbia University, lead author on the study. "It shows that women living in gender-equal countries have better cognitive test scores later in life than women living in gender-unequal societies. Moreover, in countries that became more gender-equal over time, women's cognitive performance improved relative to men's." Bonsang and colleagues Vegard Skirbekk (Norwegian Institute of Public Health and Columbia University) and Ursula Staudinger (Columbia University) had noticed that the differences in men's and women's scores on cognitive tests varied widely across countries. In countries in Northern Europe, for example, women tend to outperform men on memory tests, while the opposite seems to be true in several Southern European ...

Jonathan Weiss, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health and CIHR Chair in Autism Spectrum Disorders ( ASD ) Treatment and Care Research, discovered that parents who participate in cognitive therapy with their children with autism also experience a real benefit that improves the family experience. Approximately 70 per cent of children with autism struggle with emotional or behavioural problems, and may benefit from cognitive behaviour therapy to improve their ability to manage their emotions. "Most of the time when parents bring in their kids for cognitive behaviour therapy, they are in a separate room learning what their children are doing, and are not being co-therapists," said Weiss. "What's unique about what we studied is what happens when parents are partners in the process from start to finish. Increasingly we know that it's helpful for kids with autism, specifically, and now we have proven that it's helpful for thei...

In a recent study, a research group from the Neurological Clinic of the University Hospital Ospedali Riuniti di Ancona and Marche Polytechnic University, Ancona, Italy, evaluated the reliability of the Framingham cardiovascular risk profile (FCRP) for the prediction of the evolution from mild cognitive impairment to AD. FCRP is a commonly adopted score used to calculate the risk of cardiovascular or cerebrovascular events along a 10-year period. Authors selected FCRP to evaluate if some common conditions, such as hypertension or diabetes, could be involved in increasing the risk of developing dementia. The results of this study are published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. The study, coordinated by Mauro Silvestrini and Leandro Provinciali with Giovanna Viticchi as principal investigator, demonstrated that in subjects affected by mild cognitive impairment, the presence of high FCRP scores is associated to an increased risk of developing AD. These results could have a re...

"We're interested in examining how we take the kind of continuous environment that we all live in and break it into pieces that we can understand and remember," says Chris Baldassano (@ChrisBaldassano), a postdoctoral research associate in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the study's first author. "The main finding of this paper is that we can actually observe what's going on in the brain during this chunking behavior and see that it's happening on a lot of different temporal scales, from seconds up to minutes." The study made use of two different fMRI datasets, both of which were collected for other research. In the first experiment, participants watched part of the first episode of the BBC show "Sherlock" while being scanned with fMRI. A second group of participants listened to an audio description of the same episode while being scanned. (The research team, led by Uri Hasson and Kenneth Norman, professors in the Department of...

Results of the research were published online in the  Journal of Alzheimer's Disease . Senior author Dr. Tetyana Zayats is a researcher at the KGJebsen Centre for Neuropsychiatric Disorders at the University of Bergen. The study analyzed genetic markers and IQ collected from 5,165 children in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. The genetic findings were followed up in the genetic data from two adult datasets (1) 17,008 cases with AD and 37,154 controls, and (2) 112,151 individuals assessed for general cognitive functioning. The function of the genetic markers was analysed using reporter assays in cells. Brain cells communicate via synapses containing hundreds of specialized proteins. Mutations in some of these proteins lead to dysfunctional synapses and brain diseases such as epilepsy, intellectual disability, autism or AD. Dr. Zayats and co-workers at the University of Bergen examined a subgroup of these proteins that have been implicated in synaptic plastic...

"These findings suggest that a patient's quality of life could be impacted by a diagnostic label and their expectations for the prognosis. So, when a clinician discloses the diagnosis and prognosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment or mild stage Alzheimer's disease, a patient may experience additional symptoms, like anxiety or depression," said the study's lead author, Shana Stites, PsyD , MA, MS, a clinical psychologist in the Penn Memory Center, senior research investigator for the Penn Project on Precision Medicine for the Brain (P3MB). For many years, a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease was often not made until a patient had substantial memory and cognitive problems -- by which time patients themselves were often unaware of their diagnosis. Advances in awareness, as well in diagnostic methods, mean doctors are diagnosing Alzheimer's disease earlier, and in the future, routine diagnosis may occur before symptoms even begin. According to Stites, early diag...

Dr. Nolan Damon displaying the net arithmetic evaluation that he developed. Credit score: Stefan Els On-line arithmetic evaluation ( OMA ) may assist enhance the arithmetic efficiency of deaf and hard-of-hearing learners in South Africa. This is among the key findings of a brand new examine at Stellenbosch College (SU). "OMAs may help deaf and hard-of-hearing learners to grasp troublesome mathematical ideas and supply them with equal alternatives to do effectively in formal arithmetic assessments," says Dr Nolan Damon who's a arithmetic trainer and ?blended-learning designer and coach from Worcester. He not too long ago obtained his doctorate in Curriculum Research at Stellenbosch College. Damon investigated the usage of OMAs instead type of evaluation to present pencil and paper-based arithmetic assessments which don't present deaf and hard-of-hearing learners with a good probability to showcase what they've learnt. "Deaf...

Larval zebrafish on the brink of eat a paramecium. Credit score: G. Goodhill/Queensland Mind Institute It is stated to be a "lightbulb" second -- when an thought pops into your head. The grownup human mind usually shows this sort of spontaneous exercise -- and College of Queensland specialists have uncovered how totally different experiences early in life would possibly have an effect on the character of that exercise and, in flip, alter a person's behaviour. Research chief Professor Geoffrey Goodhill , from the Queensland Mind Institute and the Faculty of Arithmetic and Physics, used zebrafish as a mannequin to analyze the origins of spontaneous neural exercise -- within the type of new ideas. "We needed to look at the fishes' spontaneous mind patterns to see if their setting had an influence on the way in which their brains wired up." The researchers discovered that spontaneous exercise within the a part of the mind that p...

"We believe that, over lengthy time scales, some aspects of the brain must have changed to better accommodate the learning parameters required by various cultural activities," said Prof. Arnon Lotem, of TAU's Department of Zoology, who led the research for the study. "The effect of culture on cognitive evolution is captured through small modifications of evolving learning and data acquisition mechanisms. Their coordinated action improves the brain network's ability to support learning processes involved in such cultural phenomena as language or tool-making." Prof. Lotem developed the new learning model in collaboration with Prof. Joseph Halpern and Prof. Shimon Edelman, both of Cornell University, and Dr. Oren Kolodny of Stanford University (formerly a PhD student at TAU). The research was recently published in  PNAS . "Our new computational approach to studying human and animal cognition may explain how human culture shaped the evolution of human...

Thanks to advances in brain sciences, it is possible to decode one's brain network by measuring functional MRI ( fMRI ) activity just for five minutes. Since the brain network is formed by genetics and experiences, it is possible to predict one's age, personality, or performance in cognitive functions from functional connectivity patterns in their brain network. In psychiatric disorders, functional connectivity, which is measured by temporal correlations between some brain regions, is too much increased or decreased compared to healthy control. It has been suggested that these abnormal connections cause the decrement of cognitive function. However, treatments of psychiatric disorders (e.g., drugs and cognitive behavior therapy) could not increase or decrease a specific connectivity between two regions, because these methods give broad effects on the global network. Therefore, the method, which can induce the both direction of change (i.e., an increase or a decrease) in a spe...