Getting better at chess, it turns out, isn’t merely a matter of thinking harder, or using one specific area of the brain—it has more to do with the neural links between brain regions. Neuroscientists from Japan studied the brainy blood-flows of both professional and amateur shogi players (a chess-like game from Japan) and found that professionals have certain brain circuits that may allow them to put on their intuitive thinking caps.

The study, published in Science, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine which brain areas showed the most blood flow as professional and amateur shogi players tested their mettle during a match. The experts showed more activity in two regions: the precuneus region in the parietal lobe, which is involved in pattern recognition, and the caudate nucleus, an area in the basal ganglia that is involved in learning, memory, and cognition.

The research team found that the precuneus-caudate connection showed up consistently when professionals were asked to come up with a rapid-fire choice of moves, but not as much for the amateurs. “These results suggest that the precuneus-caudate circuit implements the automatic, yet complicated, processes of board-pattern perception and next-move generation in board game experts,” the researchers reported. [MSNBC]

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The size of a small part of the brain, right behind the eyes, is connected with a person’s ability to gauge how likely they are to be right about factual questions, according to a study published in Science last week. This faculty is important in many real-world decisions; it can make the difference between relying on our mistaken judgment and asking for help if we realize we might be wrong.

The study’s lead author uses the game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? as an prime example of this kind of “metacognition,” or thinking about our own thinking:

“You might have the opportunity to ask the audience or phone a friend,” says Steve Fleming, a neuroscientist at University College London. But, he adds, “You need to know how sure you are about your own answer before you opt to use those lifelines.” [NPR]

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“Halo: Reach,” the newest installment in the long-running Halo video game saga, comes out today. While players are rampaging around in the digital universe and slaughtering everything in sight, they might be doing something else too: improving their decision-making skills.

Action-packed video games, including first-shooters like those in the Halo franchise, can lead people to make better and quicker rapid-fire decision, according to a Current Biology study by Daphne Bavelier and colleagues.

“What’s surprising in our study is that action games improved probabilistic inference not just for the act of gaming, but for unrelated and rather dull tasks,” Bavelier says. [Science News]

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Touch comes first. It’s the first way that people interact with the world, MIT’s Josh Ackerman says, and touch can change the way you feel about the world or engage with it.

Ackerman and colleagues published a study in Science this week further uncovering the ways that what we touch influences what we think. In a series of experiments, his team demonstrated numerous examples of the tactile altering the mental, like people negotiating more stubbornly when sitting in hard, uncomfortable chairs, or taking decisions more seriously when holding a weighty object like a clipboard.

The idea, then, is that due to the strong connection between our senses and our thoughts, touching a surface can trigger feelings related to the metaphorical value we assign to it. Or, more simply, the feeling of weight makes us feel like a decision is more “weighty,” a harsh surface like sandpaper leads to harsh feelings toward other people, and the touch of smoothness makes us feel like things are going to smooth over.

“The tactile sensation is extremely important early in development. The idea that other associations would be built on that makes intuitive sense,” said Franklin & Marshall College psychologist Michael Anderson, who was not involved in the study. “Brain regions that may initially have been dedicated to one particular task, turn out to contribute to multiple tasks” [Wired.com].

For more on this, check out Ed Yong’s in-depth post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth may have had the right idea when she scrubbed her hands following the murder of King Duncan. An odd new study suggests that hand washing may help people deal with the emotional consequences of decisions–and not just big decisions, like whether or not to participate in regicide, but also minor calls, like which free CD to take home.

[Psychology researcher Spike W. S. Lee] and a colleague named Norbert Schwarz decided to test hand washing’s effect on one kind of bad feeling: the lingering tension we feel after being forced to choose between two attractive options, because picking one option makes us feel that we’ve lost the other. Psychologists know that people usually try to soothe this inner conflict by later exaggerating the positive aspects of their choice. “In other words, after they make the choice, they will like the chosen option more than before the choice,” Lee explains [NPR].

For the study, published in Science, the researchers told students they were evaluating products for a consumer survey. The students first ranked 10 CDs in order of preference, and were then told they could take home either their fifth- or sixth-ranked CD as a token of appreciation. After they made their choices, they were told it was time to evaluate a liquid soap–but some students washed with the soap, while others only looked at its packaging. Finally, the students were asked to rank the same set of CDs again.

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A team of French scientists have proposed that when it comes to multi-tasking, our brains can handle only so much. In a new study, published in Science, scientists Sylvain Charron and Etienne Koechlin found that while the brain can easily divide its attention between two tasks, a third task will begin to slow it down–suggesting there is an upper limit to our multi-tasking abilities.

The scientists asked volunteers to do two complicated matching tasks simultaneously. With two tasks to deal with, the brain’s frontal lobes swung into action, working together to get the job done. The left side of the brain picked up one assignment while the right managed the other. But when scientists threw a third task into the mix, the brain began to fumble, with the volunteers making mistakes and slowing down, leading Koechlin to suggest that our frontal lobes “can’t maintain more than two tasks.”

To find out more about how the brain maxes out on multi-tasking and what this means for people who drink coffee and text while driving, head to Not Exactly Rocket Science’s for Ed Yong’s post: When multi-tasking, each half of the brain focuses on different goals.

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Image: Etienne Koechlin

Beauty may lie in the eyes of the beholder, but morality, apparently, lies just behind your right ear–in an area scientists call the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ).

In a study that helps explain the mechanics of morality, neuroscientist Liane Young and her colleagues found that activity in the RTPJ is linked to the types of moral judgments we make–and those judgments can easily be tinkered with using a mere magnet. The researchers found that by delivering magnetic pulses to the RTPJ they were able to impact moral judgments; the magnetic pulses made people less likely to condemn others for attempting but failing to inflict harm [Nature]. The findings were published in journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Says Young: “You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior. To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing” [BBC].

Most of us make moral judgments based on not just what the consequences of an action were, but also on what the person’s intentions were. So little children and people with mental illness aren’t judged as harshly for their actions, because their intentions usually aren’t bad. It’s not just a matter of what they did, but how much they understood what they were doing [Nature].

The process of figuring out how much blame to attribute to a person involves the RTPJ. So for this study, scientists used a non-invasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to deliver small magnetic pulses to the RTPJ; the pulses temporarily stop brain cells from working normally. Then the researchers asked their subjects questions based on different scenarios while monitoring brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

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For years, scientists have debated where humanity’s sense of fairness came from. Some proposed it was a glitch in the brain’s wiring that causes people to be kind and fair to strangers, while others said it was a remnant of Stone Age thinking--that deep in our brains we see everyone we meet as part of our tiny family, and can’t imagine encountering someone who won’t ever be seen again [Wired]. But now, in a new study published in Science, scientists studying groups of people from different societies have suggested that our sense of fairness may depend on the type of society we live in.

The researchers found evidence that the more complex the society, the more developed those people’s sense of fairness. You can’t get the effects we’re seeing from genes,” said Joe Henrich, a University of British Columbia evolutionary psychologist and co-author of the study.” These are things you learn as a consequence of growing up in a particular place” [Wired].

For this study, scientists observed 2,100 people from different societies–from African herders, Colombian fishermen, and Missouri wage workers. The groups varied in size, and researchers also evaluated the people’s involvement in organized social activities like markets and religion–a common marker, scientists say, of the presence of a moral code that extends beyond kin. They then administered a series of games to study how group members viewed selfish behavior and how willing they were to punish it.

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Contagiousness: It’s contagious! Happiness was contagious in 2008, then loneliness last year, and don’t forget being fat. Now it’s generosity that spreads like the flu across social networks, according to James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis (who were both behind the happiness study). Their new study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To test out whether generosity spreads, the scientists devised a game. In groups of four, each person had 20 “credits,” some of which they could decide to toss into a common fund for all the players. The scoring was set up so that giving to the fund was costly unless the other players did it too: If everyone kept their money, they’d have the 20 credits, but if everyone put all they could into the fund, each player would end up with 32. However, the players had no way to know how generous the others were being. The best payoff would come if everyone gave all their money — but without knowing what others were doing, it always made sense to keep one’s money and skim from the generosity of others [Wired.com].

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Researchers are making the case that a person’s political views cause them to see with a tinted perspective.

Scientists showed undergraduate students a series of digitally darkened or lightened photos of President Barack Obama last fall, and asked them which photos best represented him as a person. The results were striking: while self-described liberals tended to pick the digitally lightened photos of the president, self-described conservative students more frequently picked the darkened images. The more one agrees with a politician, in other words, the lighter his skin tone seems; the less you agree, the darker it becomes [Newsweek]. The study will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Yawning is contagious. So too, it seems, are being fat, being sad, and a host of other things that we social creatures tend to pick up from each other. In a study published this week in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, scientists picked out one more trait that could be contagious among connected people: making bad business decisions.

Researchers had already confirmed that people have a hard time letting go of their own bad investments. For example, someone who buys a lemon of a car or a dilapidated house will, instead of owning up that it was a mistake and cutting their losses, continue to commit to the project and pour more money, effort and emotions into it [Los Angeles Times]. The key finding in this study, however, was that this bad business psychology can spread to others.

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Following up on today’s earlier post about alcohol and brain injuries, we bring you a study on alcohol and risk taking behavior. It seems obvious that drinking alcohol would lead to immediate risk taking, but does drinking as a teenager lead to risk taking behavior as an adult? Some researchers have suspected as much, but they haven’t been able to rule out the possibility that risk-prone people simply start drinking at an earlier age. So a research group chose an obvious course of action to test the idea—they got a bunch of rats drunk and let them gamble.

The researchers tested two groups of genetically identical rats, one group that was fed a normal diet and another that boozed it up. To get the rats drunk, the researchers borrowed the tried-and-true approach of frat boys everywhere—they fed them Jell-O shots. The rats went on a 20 day bender and were tested for risky behavior 3 weeks later, when they were adults, using a gambling task. The animals learned that pressing one lever produced small but certain rewards in the form of small sugar pellets and an adjacent lever yielded bigger rewards—more pellets—but paid off less frequently. The researchers rigged the game so that in some testing sessions choosing the certain reward was the best overall strategy, while in other sessions the “risky” lever yielded the greatest overall payoff [ScienceNOW Daily News].

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A person can witness an event in real life, see a doctored video of the same event, and then convince themselves that what they saw on the video is what actually happened, according to a recent study that casts doubt on the reliability of eyewitness testimony.

Psychologists set up an experiment where they filmed two people sitting side by side–one experimental subject and one researcher pretending to be a participant–playing a gambling game where they bet phony money on whether or not they could answer multiple choice questions correctly. They were told that the person with the most money at the end would win a prize.

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It may not come as much of a surprise to dog-owners, but it seems that dogs and babies share similar logical abilities, as shown by a study published in Science.

Experimenters started out with a classic logic experiment, which goes like this: researchers hide a toy in location “A” multiple times while looking at a 10-month-old baby and talking to him (“Look, I have this nice ball!”). When asked to find the toy, the baby always goes to location “A.” The experimenter then hides the toy at location “B,” again while interacting with the baby. But this time, when asked to find the toy, the baby continues to search for it at location “A.” The findings hold, even when a team changes experimenters midtest. Researchers believe that infants make this error because they believe the adults have taught them something fundamental about the world (i.e., “Your toy will always be at location ‘A’”) [ScienceNow].

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If you’re trying to get people to work together, carrots may prove more useful than sticks–that is, rewarding cooperation might motivate people more than punishing them, according to a study published in Science.

Test subjects played the “public goods game,” in which they have to decide whether or not to donate money to the group’s pot. The pot is multiplied and redistributed equally, regardless of who contributes and who doesn’t. When people play a pure version of the game, the temptation to freeload – reap the rewards without contributing anything – often leads to rapidly disintegrating cooperation [New Scientist]. But researchers found that when players were given the choice to either reward their fellow players for good behavior, or punish them for failing to donate, rewarding others yielded a larger payoff for the group as a whole. Groups that could reward each other earned much higher payoffs than those that could only punish, or those that could do neither [ScienceBlogs].

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Image: iStockPhoto