Cognitive neuroscience articles within Nature

Featured

  • Editorial |

    Rats turn out to be surprisingly useful for research on cognition. But if the goal is to understand the human brain and its many disorders, then primate studies remain essential.

  • News Feature |

    Studying primates is the only way to understand human cognition — or so neuroscientists thought. But there may be much to learn from rats and mice, finds Alison Abbott.

    • Alison Abbott

  • News & Views |

    The neocortex of the mammalian brain mediates functions such as sensory perception and ultimately consciousness and language. The spread of local signals across large distances in this brain region has now been clarified.

    • Dirk Feldmeyer

  • News and Views Q&A |

    The ability to perceive Earth's magnetic field, which at one time was dismissed as a physical impossibility, is now known to exist in diverse animals. The receptors for the magnetic sense remain elusive. But it seems that at least two underlying mechanisms exist — sometimes in the same organism.

    • Kenneth J. Lohmann

  • Letter |

    Millions of pounds per year are spent on various 'brain-training' programs; however, the efficacy and performance of these training regimes is still unclear. In collaboration with the BBC, a six-week online study of brain training was conducted. Although improvements were observed in the specific tasks used for training, in the authors' view there was no evidence that these improvements transferred to other untrained cognitive tasks.

    • Adrian M. Owen
    • , Adam Hampshire
    •  & Clive G. Ballard

  • Letter |

    Animals must detect water in their environment to stay alive, but the molecular basis for water detection has been unclear. Here the essential mediators of water-sensing and drinking in fruitflies have been identified: an ion channel of the degenerin/epithelial sodium channel family, and the sensory neurons that make it.

    • Peter Cameron
    • , Makoto Hiroi
    •  & Kristin Scott

  • Books & Arts |

    French chemist Hervé This is a pioneer of the field of molecular gastronomy, the science of cooking. From perfecting the boiled egg to making custards with meat proteins, he has advised top chefs worldwide. He tells Nature why he is moving on to 'note-by-note' cuisine using compounds to build taste and smells, and why turkey is best cooked in the dishwasher.

    • Michael White

  • News Feature |

    Last year, functional magnetic resonance imaging made its debut in court. Virginia Hughes asks whether the technique is ready to weigh in on the fate of murderers.

    • Virginia Hughes

  • Letter |

    Reactive electrophiles are noxious chemicals, such as acrolein in cigarette smoke, and are detected by the ion channel TRPA1 in humans. Here it is shown that TRPA1 channels sense these chemicals in the gustatory chemosensory neurons of fruitflies and mosquitoes, too. Further findings show that, unlike with other chemical senses such as smell or taste, the detection of reactive electrophiles relies on an ancient sensor that has been conserved in molecular detail through some 500 million years of evolution.

    • Kyeongjin Kang
    • , Stefan R. Pulver
    •  & Paul A. Garrity

  • News |

    The positioning of people's photos affects how attractive and powerful they seem to be.

    • Matt Kaplan

  • Opinion |

    People's grasp of scientific debates can improve if communicators build on the fact that cultural values influence what and whom we believe, says Dan Kahan.

    • Dan Kahan

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