Month: September 2020

Touch-and-know: Brain activity during tactile stimuli reveals hand preferences in people

Scientists show that it is possible to distinguish between left-handed and right-handed people by noninvasively monitoring just their brain activity during passive tactile stimulation. These results are key in haptic research (the study of sensory systems) and have various important implications for brain-computer interfaces, augmented reality, and even artificial intelligence. Read Full Article (External Site) […]

Published on September 14, 2020

Syntactic Representations Are Both Abstract and Semantically Constrained: Evidence From Children’s and Adults’ Comprehension and Production/Priming of the English Passive

Abstract All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children’s knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children’s and adults’ performance is additionally semantically constrained, varying according to the distance between […]

Published on September 14, 2020

Analogical Comparison Promotes Theory‐of‐Mind Development

Abstract Theory‐of‐mind (ToM) is an integral part of social cognition, but how it develops remains a critical question. There is evidence that children can gain insight into ToM through experience, including language training and explanatory interactions. But this still leaves open the question of how children gain these insights—what processes drive this learning? We propose […]

Published on September 14, 2020