Parents should strictly limit how much children under two years old watch television or videos, says the American Academy of Pediatrics in a new policy statement, since TV time not only doesn’t seem to benefit babies, it may come with developmental drawbacks. (Activities like computer and touchscreen games, where the babies interact with what’s happening on the screen rather than passively watch it, aren’t included in the statement.) The academy issued a similar statement in 1999, discouraging screen time for kids less than 24 months old—and in the intervening decade, there’s been more research to back up that recommendation.

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We want others to think well of us—so if we know someone’s watching, most of us tend to behave a little better. People with autism spectrum disorders, however, don’t, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found. Since most people, psychologists think, clean up their acts out of concern for their social reputation, the new study bolsters the idea that people with autism and related conditions don’t take into account, or perhaps fully understand, what others think of them.

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Hormones are major mood-regulators, as anyone who has been cranky before a period or had their reproductive organs removed for medical reasons can tell you. In fact, depression is a common side effect of such surgeries in humans. But does that extend to some of the most regularly de-hormoned animals out there—our pets? That’s the thought-provoking thesis of a recent Slate piece, and while there’s been no systematic research on how such surgeries affect cats and dogs, a smattering of research has suggested that having your supply of hormones eliminated does affect the mood of mice and primates, free of the confounding influences one finds in humans. (more…)

What’s the News: One of memory’s big jobs is to keep straight what actually happened versus what we imagined: whether we said something out loud or to ourselves, whether we locked the door behind us or just thought about locking the door. That ability, a new study found, is linked to the presence of a small fold in the front of the brain, which some people have and others don’t—a finding that could help researchers better understand not only healthy memory, but disorders like schizophrenia in which the line between the real and the imagined is blurred.

Scans of a brain with a distinctive paracingulate sulcus (left, marked by arrow) and without one (right)

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Placebos are inactive treatments that shouldn’t, in some sense, have a real effect. And yet they often do. But the chemical basis of the placebo effect, despite its enormous importance, is still largely a mystery. A study published this week in Nature Medicine shows that cannabinoid receptors are involved in the placebo response to pain, which hasn’t been demonstrated before. The finding implies that the brain’s own endocannabinoids can fight pain, and actually do it via the same pathway as several compounds in the cannabis plant.

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What’s the News: A new study suggests that watching brain activity when subjects are shown images of naked children can identify which are pedophiles. But what does this really mean in practical terms?

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A recent study found that most people treated with a single high dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychoactive mushrooms, showed a long-lasting change in personality—namely, an increase in openness. One of five broad measures of temperament used by psychologists, this quality is generally defined as openness to new ideas or experiences, awareness of feelings in the self and others, and is strongly tied to creativity and aesthetic appreciation. This is one of the first studies to link a single treatment with a drug in a laboratory setting to a long-lasting change in personality.

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What’s the news:  In a study published last week, researchers showed they could reconstruct video clips by watching viewers’ brain activity. The video of the study’s results, below, is pretty amazing, showing the original clips and their reconstructions side by side. How does it work, and does it mean mind-reading is on its way in?

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When rats were injected with a chemical similar to marijuana’s main ingredient, THC, shortly after a undergoing a severely stressful event, they showed a significant reduction in symptoms like those seen in people with post-traumatic stress disorder. The study tested a synthetic cannabinoid called WIN 55,212-2, which was injected directly into the animals’ amygdala, a brain region involved in the regulation of emotions like fear and anxiety. Timing was important. Rats given the drug two and 24 hours after the stressor—being forced to swim for 15 minutes—appeared less “traumatized” when tested a week later, compared with those given the drug 48 hours later or given no drug at all. While the study adds to the already large and complex pile of evidence that the cannabinoid system has a vital role in regulating emotions like anxiety, it’s far from proving that cannabinoids will be useful for treating PTSD in humans.

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A couple cups of coffee a day may help keep the blues away. A large epidemiological study of 50,000 women published yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that subjects who drink two or more cups of coffee on a daily basis were slightly less likely to be diagnosed with depression over a 10-year span compared to their less-caffeinated peers. Women who drank two to three cups of coffee were 15 percent less likely to be treated for the blues; those who drank four or more had a 20 percent lower risk.

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What’s the News: The best way doctors have to find out how much pain a patient’s in is to ask—but that approach can fall short when someone’s unable to speak, exaggerating or downplaying their condition, or just plain unsure how to rate their pain on a 10-point scale. Because of these problems with self-reporting, scientists have long been looking for an objective, physiological measure to quantify pain. A recent brain scanning study, in which the researchers could pick out painful experiences based on neural activity, brings that goal closer.

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What’s the News: We may strive for humility, but we benefit from a little hubris, too, according to a study published last week in Nature. Overconfidence in your abilities can help you triumph in competitions you might not have won otherwise, the study found, and can impart an evolutionary advantage when the potential payoff is high compared to the cost of conflict.

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What’s the News: A new thumbnail-sized microscope will give researchers a way to see what’s happening in the brain of a mouse as it moves around and goes about its business. The microscope, described earlier this week in Nature Methods, weighs less than 2 grams—little enough that it can be fitted atop a rodent’s head—and tracks the activity of up to 200 brain cells.

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Where is the cup? THERE IS NO CUP.

What’s the News: Ever since Alan Turing, the father of modern computers, proposed that sufficiently advanced computers could pass as human in a conversation, the classic Turing test has involved what’s essentially instant messaging. Computers designed to imitate human conversational patterns are often entered by their designers in competitions where they aim to fool people in front of a distant monitor into thinking they’re human—and they do a pretty good job, although some human mimics, like chatbots, sound like crazed children on their first spin in cyberspace (“I’m not a robot, I’m a unicorn!“).

But scientists have noticed that humans describe where objects are in space in a specific way, taking into account what spatial relationships would be most useful for a human listener. Artificial intelligences, even fairly sophisticated ones, talk about space differently, and the difference is large enough that it can form the basis of a new type of Turing test, British scientists reported at a conference in April. Now, New Scientist has developed an interactive version of the test, which lets you see for yourself what statements about space set off your silicon-lifeform alarms. So what’s behind it?

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A study published yesterday in the journal Pediatrics found that pre-schoolers who watched a nine-minute clip of Nickledeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants scored lower on a variety of cognitive tests given to them immediately afterward, compared to peers who spent the same time watching an educational PBS show or drawing. Although the researchers don’t specifically call out SpongeBob (one of the most popular shows amongst children ages 2-11), they conclude that fast-paced, entertainment-oriented shows like this, which rapidly cut between different scenes, could cause short-term reductions in children’s ability to focus and solve problems.

That may sound ominous, but it’s important to note that the study only looked at children immediately after watching the show, so there’s no evidence that this effect will persist. And although previous research has shown a clear association between watching television at a young age and attention problems later in life, it’s not clear whether TV—or any particular shows—are actually causing long-term problems. Still, if your 4-year-old is about to take a preschool entrance exam, it’s probably not the best time for a SpongeBob marathon.

[Via the Los Angeles Times]