From the article: “This animal is the opportunity to think about and develop new techniques or potential targets for making new drugs, because their [reproductive] cells have the same program that we have in mice and humans, but they’re behaving differently,” says Miguel Angel Brieño-Enríquez at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

Native to East Africa, naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber) live for up to 37 years and form underground colonies with social structures similar to those of bees, including a single queen that produces offspring for her entire life. By contrast, mice only live for about four years and their fertility starts dropping when they are only 9 months old.

Curious about these differences in reproductive lifespans, Brieño-Enríquez and his colleagues looked at the ovaries of naked mole rats under a microscope when the animals were 1, 5, 8, 15, 28 and 90 days old. They used advanced staining and testing techniques to identify the different kinds of cells they saw. In particular, they were looking for germ cells that can divide and mature into oocytes – or eggs – through a process known as oogenesis.

In humans, mice and other mammals, oogenesis only occurs before birth and, in some species, shortly afterwards, leaving newborn females with a limited lifetime supply of eggs. Those eggs gradually die over time, leading to reduced fertility with age.

In the naked mole rats, though, Brieño-Enríquez and his colleagues found large numbers of germ cells at every stage of life they tested, with numbers steadily increasing throughout the first week of life. At 8 days old, the naked mole rats had an average of 1.5 million egg cells – 95 times more than 8-day-old mice, says Brieño-Enríquez.

Study

From the article: Being overweight is often linked to negatives in children’s physical health but how about to their cognitive health? A study published in PloS One suggests a link between excess weight in preschool children and declined executive functioning.

Overweight and obesity in children has become increasingly prevalent and problematic worldwide in the recent past. Though obesity is thought of commonly as simply being overweight due to poor nutrition and lack of exercise, it is a bit more complex than that. Obesity involves the entire body and can be affected by genetics, environment, and the way these two interact.

Risk factors for childhood obesity can include preterm birth and low birth weight. Cognitive factors, such as executive functioning, have been thought to be related to excess weight by affecting the mental control around healthy habits. A relationship between excess weight and executive functioning impairments has been shown in school-aged children, adolescents, and adults, but there is a gap in literature around preschool aged children, which this study seeks to address.

For their study, Narueporn Likhitweerawong and colleagues utilized 1,181 preschoolers aged 2 to 5 from seven private and public schools in Thailand to serve as their sample. Data was collected in 2021. Schools chosen represented predominantly middle-class socioeconomic status. Children who were underweight or diagnosed with neurodevelopmental or genetic disorders were excluded. Measures included an executive functioning inventory filled out by the participants’ parents, weight status, and pre-specified confounders, such as age, birth weight, breastfeeding status, sex, and more.

Results showed that children who had impaired executive functioning were more likely to be overweight. In particular, impaired inhibition and decreased working memory capacity were both significantly correlated with being overweight for preschoolers in this study.

From the article: People with and without anxiety disorders learn to fear a threat equally quickly, according to new research. However, people with anxiety disorders tend to have a harder time learning to stop being afraid on a physiological level (when the threat is gone) compared to healthy individuals. These trends can be detected by monitoring fear-potentiated startle responses.

The study was published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology.

Learning to recognize threats is a capacity that is of extreme importance for survival. However, problems in these processes, such as situations when an individual easily learns to associate certain stimuli with danger but fails to extinguish this association once the stimuli in question are not longer associated with danger, have long been linked to the development and maintenance of pathological anxiety.

Some theorists have linked the fact that anxiety symptoms start developing in late childhood and early adolescence with variations in the maturation of neural circuitry supporting threat learning. This is often explored experimentally by using the so-called differential threat conditioning study plans.

From the article: More frequent smartphone checking behavior is associated with greater incidences of daily cognitive failures, according to new research published in the British Journal of Psychology. However, the new findings also indicate that some forms of screen time are actually associated with reduced cognitive failures.

There are concerns that smartphone use is related to the phenomenon of daily cognitive failures. Research has suggested that frequent smartphone use can lead to cognitive overload and decrease attentional control, which may contribute to cognitive failures such as forgetfulness, distraction, and mind wandering. Additionally, smartphone use can be highly distracting and interruptive, which may interfere with the ability to focus and complete tasks.

“This is a very interesting topic given that smartphone use has become ubiquitous in recent years and has dramatically changed the way people communicate and access information,” said study author Andree Hartanto, an assistant professor of psychology at Singapore Management University.

“It has been suggested that smartphone use may have negative effects on our cognitive processes, leading to daily cognitive failures such as forgetfulness and difficulty in paying attention. However, the evidence is mixed. Given the widespread use of smartphones and the potential impact on daily life, we believe that it is important to examine the relationship between smartphone use and cognitive failures rigorously with a better methodology using a daily dairy approach with objective measures of smartphone use.”

From the article: A new study explored reasons why some citizens of the former East Germany chose not to view files that the Stasi, the notorious secret police force, kept of them when the archives were opened in 1991. Aside from claiming that the information is not relevant, most people stated that they wanted to avoid finding out that one of their colleagues or family members was a Stasi informant and that viewing those files would impact their ability to trust others. The study was published in Cognition.

Curiosity, the desire to obtain knowledge, is one of the defining traits of human beings. Yet there are situations when people willingly choose not to know. This phenomenon — deliberate ignorance — has been attracting a growing interest from researchers in various scientific disciplines.

When a society faces a fundamental transition, such as moving from war to peace or from dictatorship to democracy, people must find ways to interpret, remember or ignore past experiences and include that interpretation into the collective memory of the group in a way that allows the society to move forward.