Studies and Analyses

Bigger and brighter isn’t better, at least not when trying to view moving objects.

That is the counter-intuitive result of a study performed by a team of Vanderbilt psychologists which sheds new light on one of the most sophisticated processes performed by the brain: identifying and tracking moving objects.

“The bigger an object, the easier it is to see. But it is actually harder for people to determine the motion of objects larger than a tennis ball held at arms length than

Results of a Johns Hopkins study suggest that natural chemicals released in the body as a result of chronic inflammation may underpin the failure of low-fat, so-called heart healthy diets to actually reduce cholesterol and heart disease risk in some people.

According to the study’s results, published in the July 15 issue of Circulation, measuring circulating blood levels of C-reactive protein — a marker of inflammation already linked to increased risk of heart disease — may pre

Brain scientists will have to rethink the current theory of how the visual processing region of the brain is organized to analyze basic information about the geometry of the environment, according to Duke neurobiologists. In a new study reported in the June 26, 2003, Nature, they studied the visual-processing region — called the visual cortex — of ferrets, as the animals’ brains responded to complex patterns.

The results, they said, indicated that clusters of neurons in that region

Yale researchers have, for the first time, identified two types of reading disability: a primarily inherent type with higher cognitive ability (poor readers who compensate for disability), and a more environmentally influenced type with lower cognitive skills and attendance at more disadvantaged schools (persistently poor readers).

The findings, published in the July 1 issue of Biological Psychiatry, show that compensated poor readers were able to overcome some of the disability, impr

Hypochondriasis, or excessive worry over one’s health, is a psychiatric disorder that can affect every aspect of a person’s life — especially interpersonal relationships. University of Iowa researchers are finding ways to study the condition and how it affects relationships, including patient-doctor interaction.

Hypochondriasis involves preoccupation with a fear of having or developing a serious illness, despite lack of physical evidence of illness. It affects 4 to 9 percent of f

Parents whose kids are allergic to peanuts may be relieved to know that it’s possible their children could outgrow their allergy over time.

In a study of 80 children ages 4 to 14 with well-documented peanut allergies, researchers at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and Arkansas Children’s Hospital found that some children completely lost their potentially serious or life-threatening allergy to peanuts, and that among those who did, there was a low risk of allergy recurr