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  • A video game can change the brain, may improve empathy in middle schoolers

    2018-09-12

    A space-exploring robot crashes on a distant planet. In order to gather the pieces of its damaged spaceship, it needs to build emotional rapport with the local alien inhabitants. The aliens speak a different language but their facial expressions are remarkably humanlike.

    This fantastical scenario is the premise of a video game developed for middle schoolers by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers to study whether video games can boost kids' empathy, and to understand how learning such skills can change neural connections in the brain.

    Results published this week in npj Science of Learning (a Nature journal) reveal for the first time that, in as few as two weeks, kids who played a video game designed to train empathy showed greater connectivity in brain networks related to empathy and perspective taking. Some also showed altered neural networks commonly linked to emotion regulation, a crucial skill that this age group is beginning to develop, the study authors say.

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  • Robots have power to significantly influence children's opinions

    2018-09-12

    Young children are significantly more likely than adults to have their opinions and decisions influenced by robots, according to new research.

    The study, conducted at the University of Plymouth, compared how adults and children respond to an identical task when in the presence of both their peers and humanoid robots.

    It showed that while adults regularly have their opinions influenced by peers, something also demonstrated in previous studies, they are largely able to resist being persuaded by robots.

    However, children aged between seven and nine were more likely to give the same responses as the robots, even if they were obviously incorrect.

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  • Why we stick to false beliefs: Feedback trumps hard evidence

    2018-09-12

    Ever wonder why flat earthers, birthers, climate change and Holocaust deniers stick to their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

    New findings from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, suggest that feedback, rather than hard evidence, boosts people's sense of certainty when learning new things or trying to tell right from wrong.

    Developmental psychologists have found that people's beliefs are more likely to be reinforced by the positive or negative reactions they receive in response to an opinion, task or interaction, than by logic, reasoning and scientific data.

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