BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR

It is undeniable that stereotype threat represents a  limiting factor to people's performance in society. It does not matter what kind of community a person lives, because all they have distinct ways to stipulate boundaries that enhance differences between groups, undermining one in detriment of the other.  In many situations, stereotype threat leads people to conform with is expected of them by a certain sociocultural general belief that is usual to label people according to their origins, race or sex, for example. Although many studies have been done in intention to underline the causes of IQ difference among people, the stereotype threats are still pervasive in modern societies promoting the increase of gender and race gaps, that ultimately compromise people's achievements. Genetic and environment plays a decisive role in people abilities and capacities,  showing that both are the  primary influences on people's intelligen...

Visual imagery is a kind of mental representation of certain acquired knowledge about something that we have already experienced in the sensory world.  Our memory plays an important role in defining the features of the mental image that we construct aggregating new information every time that we learn any new thing about the same concept.  This mechanism enhances our perceptual potential about whatever we need to recall.  Simple situations in life require this type of knowledge. Visual imagery is necessary to picture a scenario when you want to be sure if your coffee maker was still on when you left the house on a rush, for example. In a situation like that, it would be possible to visualize the mental representations of the sequences focused on the acts before you have closed the door as if you were seeing yourself by someone else perspective. Probably it would be impossible to retrieve this memory without accessing a mental image of these last scenes before making ...

There is no doubt that the differences in language go beyond the frontiers of speech. Some scientists are very interested in investigating how these differences can affect people’s perception and understand how they can influence their cognitive processes. According to Whorf’s proposal, the variances between several types of languages interfere in the way that people think about the message content, influencing their communication. These differences are known as linguist relativity, which can be exemplified as the low probability that a native American has to understand the use of the Portuguese word “ Saudade ,” for example. As long as this word has no effective term to be translated into English, according to Whorf hypothesis, the American person will not make accurately sense about this word, as a Brazilian has and consequently, this world would be better interpreted and used by people who speak Portuguese than English. Maybe an English speaker will think that other usual w...

All the common concepts that we have in mind to recognize everything in life are primarily based on simple ideas. Each concept like " baby" consists of a representation of a building block which by our knowledge is created around, as that babies are smaller than adults, they are cute, they like to play, they cry for everything, they are immature and so on.  Conscious of the meaning of these concepts it is possible to use this knowledge in our benefit making sense above all the things that surround us. The knowledge about a baby, for example, probably will lead us to behave with extreme precaution in the presence of one, as far that the knowledge we have about babies is constructed around the fact that we should have protective attitudes towards them. This example leads us to understand that cognition depends on trivial concepts to build the knowledge represented in our minds. Make sense of a given phrase like  "At most colleges and universities, a large numbe...

Normally our memories are very accurate, and when asked, most people can make significant recollections full of details about several events of their past. Talking about early childhood or work experiences, for example, can be seen as a good way to measure how well your memory can be if you are in your elderly years. However, even young people can easily forget several pieces of information that they had any previous contact a couple of weeks ago, like the name of that famous Netflix series recommended by a friend.  Some theories have been tested helping us to understand why memory can oscillate working as a video recorder in some situations while in other moments, that same memory also leads people to believe that "perhaps" they are just starting to experience the first symptoms of Alzheimer even if they are on top of their youth. Fortunately, evidence from research in this field has shown that most of the time our memory is capable of recalling with confide...