The Evolution Of Symbolic Language by Terrence Deacon and Ursula Goodenough. Deacon's The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain is a book I liked a great deal, though in hindsight I don't think I had the background...
Social Cognition in Dogs, or How did Fido get so smart?. This you know: Domesticated dogs seem to have an uncanny ability to understand human communicative gestures. If you point to something the dog zeroes in on the object or...
Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable: Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities...
Covers all the major angles. Nice that there's a newspaper which can support this sort of reporting (on the other hand). Not surprising that Amy Bishop seems to have some history of delusions of grandeur, she's claiming that both she...
Cardiovascular fitness is associated with cognition in young adulthood: During early adulthood, a phase in which the central nervous system displays considerable plasticity and in which important cognitive traits are shaped, the effects of exercise on cognition remain poorly understood....
More Singularity stuff. I'm Not Saying People Are Stupid, says Eliezer Yudkowsky in response to my summary of his talk. The last line of his post says: "I'm here because I'm crazy," says the patient, "not because I'm stupid." So...
For Gun-Shy Consumers, Debit Is Replacing Credit: Visa announced this spring that spending on Visa debit cards in the United States surpassed credit for the first time in the company's history. In 2008, debit payment volume was $206 billion, compared...
Recently I listened to the author of Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, Gene M. Heyman, interviewed on the Tom Ashbrook show. A lot of the discussion revolved around the term "disease", which I can't really comment on, but a great...
We know that dogs can read human faces, it turns out that babies can infer the meaning of different dog barks: New research shows babies have a handle on the meaning of different dog barks - despite little or no...
Update: See Ed Yong. Randall Parker points me to a new paper from Joshua Greene which describes the neurological responses of individuals when do, or don't, lie, when lying might be in their self-interest. From EurekaAlert: The research was designed...
