A survey of 100 researchers in animal behavior, conducted by Marcela Benítez and colleagues from Emory University and published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, has provided insights into current scientific views on animal emotions and consciousness. The survey reflects a growing acceptance of these capacities in a wide range of animals, highlighting the evolving perspectives in the field of animal behavior.
| Animal Group | Percentage Believing in Emotions |
|-----------------------|----------------------------------|
| Non-human primates | 98% |
| Other mammals | 89% |
| Birds | 78% |
| Cephalopods | 72% |
| Fish | 53% |
| Insects | 67% |
| Other invertebrates | 71% |
The survey suggests a significant shift in scientific thought, with a majority of researchers now attributing emotions to a wide range of animals, even those previously considered less sentient. This indicates a growing acceptance of the complexity and depth of animal emotional experiences, likely influenced by recent research in animal cognition and emotions.
A study in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging found structural differences in the precuneus, a brain region associated with memory and self-focus, in individuals who tend to ruminate, which is common in depression. The findings suggest that rumination may result from network-level interactions in the brain.
Psychologists found that 44.7% of recorded earworms matched the original song's pitch perfectly, suggesting a common 'musical superpower'.
Dedre Gentner is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Northwestern University. Her research interests include learning and thinking, analogy, similarity and metaphor, concepts and conceptual structure, language and cognition, and language acquisition.
A new model developed by researchers at MIT and the University of Washington predicts human goals or actions more accurately than previous models. The latent inference budget model identifies patterns in human or machine decision-making and uses this information to forecast behavior.
- The format of human thought is a subject of debate, with some people visualizing images and others relying on an internal voice or both.
- Aphantasia is a condition where an individual cannot visualize images in their mind's eye, while anendophasia is the absence of an inner voice or inner speech.
- A study by Nedergaard and Lupyan found that people with more inner speech recalled more words in a verbal memory task and were faster and more accurate in a rhyming task compared to those with less inner speech. However, they did not differ in task-switching or same/different tasks.
- The study suggests that people with less inner speech may use a different form of thinking called "unsymbolized thinking."
- Most people use a combination of visual imagery, an internal voice, or both when thinking, but not everyone does.
We measured both undirected FC (correlation in the time domain, coherence in the frequency domain) and directed FC (Granger causality, in both time and frequency domains) on the same data.