cognitive

Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital had the bright idea that, since kids with anger-control problems tend to resist psychotherapy but enjoy video games, the researchers should develop a game that sneakily helps kids practice emotion-control skills -- and in the process perhaps reduces the need for medication.

The game, called RAGE Control (short for Regulate and Gain Emotional Control), employs a finger heart rate monitor; users with elevated heart rates actually lose the ability to shoot enemy spaceships. Researchers say the idea is to teach kids to better control their emotional responses -- and specifically to reduce outbursts of … Read more

The combination of mentally stimulating activities such as computer use and moderate physical exercise appears to decrease one's odds of suffering from age-related memory loss, according to a new Mayo Clinic study.

The researchers say their findings among a self-reporting cohort of 926 people ages 70 to 93 are just preliminary, but that the numbers are significant enough to warrant further investigation.

Previous studies have shown links between exercising one's mind and exercising one's body to improved memory, but this one, published in the May 2012 issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, suggests that a combination of … Read more

My 85-year-old grandmother wouldn't do well on a bike on the open road. Her vision, hearing, and cognition have all declined enough to make such an expedition something of a death sentence. But those indoor stationary bikes are just so...boring.

Which is why researchers launched the Cybercycle Study in 2008 in an effort to explore what kinds of benefits older adults might reap from riding stationary bikes with interactive video game features.

What they found is that the cybercyclists demonstrated greater cognitive benefits than those who rode traditional stationary bikes without the virtual enhancement, according to their article … Read more

Do you hurt everywhere? Can't find any lasting solutions? Before you start popping pills, consider a little talk therapy--by telephone.

Chronic widespread pain, a condition called fibromyalgia, affects as many as 1 in 10 Americans, and is notoriously tricky (and expensive) to manage.

In the first six months following diagnosis, it costs on average $3,481 for medications, consultations, tests, and emergency room visits, according to researchers at the University of Aberdeen and the University of Manchester, both in the U.K.

So the researchers decided to investigate two less expensive alternatives: exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy (by phone).… Read more

Smartphones may offer a smarter way to gather data in cognitive research, according to a paper in this week's journal PLoS ONE.

Until recently, when studying human behavior cognitive psychologists--who examine such things as how people think, remember, and perceive the world around them--have relied on volunteers who come to research facilities.

Collecting data solely from this sort of cohort could highly skew resulting data; for one, the number of people who volunteer their time tends to be smaller in scale, and by studying only the types of people who volunteer for this kind of research, cognitive psychologists … Read more

IBM has created what they're benignly calling "cognitive semiconductors," which are computers that can actually learn, think, and creatively process information. So, that sounds like a good idea, right? I mean, seriously, great work, IBM, but when one of your big backers is DARPA, you can't fool us. We know Skynet is upon us. Also, don't get caught with your patents down!

Computers with processors that mimic the human brain's cognition, perception, and action abilities are a lot closer than they've ever been after IBM on Wednesday unveiled the first generation of chips that will power them.

The announcement comes nearly three years after IBM and several university partners were awarded a grant by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to re-create the brain's perception, cognitive, sensation, interaction, and action abilities, while also simulating its efficient size and low-power consumption.

The grant was part of Phase 2 of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) … Read more

Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) automates the software creation process from front to back. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) provides the interoperability that enables the benefits of CASE. ArgoUML is a UML CASE tool for analyzing and designing object-oriented software. Apart from being open source freeware, it has many unique aspects that set it apart from commercial tools, including its use of psychological research to design an environment that increases productivity by supporting programmers' cognitive requirements and its pure Java nature, which allows for widespread compatibility and access.

ArgoUML's installer lets you include the Java Runtime Environment, if your … Read more

Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) appears to be just as effective in treating panic disorder and mild to moderate depression when it is done online as it is in a more traditional, group-based setting, according to a doctoral thesis to be presented next week at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

"Internet-based CBT is also more cost-effective than group therapy," says Jan Bergström, a clinical psychologist at the Anxiety Disorders Unit of the Psychiatry Northwest division of the Stockholm County Council. "The results therefore support the introduction of Internet treatment into regular psychiatry."

Bergström'… Read more