All posts tagged: cognitive development

Monkeys are surprisingly good at geometry

Monkeys are surprisingly good at geometry

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletterđź’ˇ Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. Only a handful of species apart from humans are known to understand geometry. It’s considered so rare among other animals that most scientists have long assumed even our closest non-human primate relatives struggle to grasp the concept of shapes and space. But according to a new study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some monkeys may not only have a solid handle on geometrical ideas—they cognitively process them in the same way as humans. “What surprised us wasn’t just that monkeys could do the task. It was that monkeys, children and adults seemed to think about geometric relationships in fundamentally the same way,” Jessica Cantlon, a study co-author, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), explained …

Honeybees understand basic math | Popular Science

Honeybees understand basic math | Popular Science

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletterđź’ˇ Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The brain of a honeybee (Apis mellifera) weighs less than one milligram and contains fewer than one million neurons, but that may be more than enough for surprisingly complex calculations. For decades, cognitive researchers and biologists have debated just how much the seemingly simple insects can comprehend. The answer may sound inconsequential, but it has major implications for how intelligence functions and evolves across species. Now, a team at Monash University in Australia says they have a definitive answer about bee smarts: Earth’s vital pollinators are pretty good at counting. Previous work has indicated that bees understand addition, subtraction, and even the concept of zero. While skeptics countered with the theory that the insects are solely reacting to visual cues, some biological scientists including Scarlett Howard remained confident in their assessment. “It can be challenging to put ourselves in the mind of a bee to imagine how they see the world, but trying to see the world through an …

Nearly half of older adults improve in cognition or walking over time

Nearly half of older adults improve in cognition or walking over time

Published by Jenni Sidey

A steady slide into frailty is the story many people tell themselves about old age. The numbers in a long-running federal survey tell a messier tale. In a new study led by Becca R. Levy at Yale University, nearly half of older adults tracked for up to 12 years improved in at least one basic marker of brain or body function. The odds of improvement rose with something that rarely gets treated like a health factor at all: whether someone started out with more positive beliefs about aging. “Many people equate aging with an inevitable and continuous loss of physical and cognitive abilities,” Levy said. “What we found is that improvement in later life is not rare, it’s common, and it should be included in our understanding of the aging process.” When the average hides the people Levy, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at Yale School of Public Health, and co-author Martin Slade, a lecturer in occupational medicine at Yale School of Medicine and in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the …