In a first-of-its-kind study published in the journal PLOS ONE, an international team of researchers led by scholars from New York University Shanghai and Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland explored the potential of artificial intelligence to assist in sensitive child investigative interviews. The study compared how effectively a Large Language Model (LLM), specifically ChatGPT, and untrained human interviewers were able to interview children about a mock event they witnessed. The findings suggest that AI-powered interviews may complement human efforts by improving the questioning style and efficiency of child interviews

People generally try to make other people feel good about themselves, but not when they dislike them. That’s the finding of a new study by psychologists at the Annenberg Public Policy Center investigating the extent to which people promote “positive self-views” for total strangers.

Challenging assumptions about infant memory, a novel functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study shows that babies as young as 12 months old can encode memories, researchers report. The findings suggest that infantile amnesia – the inability to remember our first few years of life – is more likely caused by memory retrieval failures rather than an inability to form memories in the first place. Despite infancy being a period of rapid learning, memories from this time do not persist into later childhood or adulthood. In general, humans cannot recall events from the first three years of life – a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. Why grown humans have a years-long blind spot in their episodic memory for the period of infancy remains a puzzle. One theory suggests this occurs because the hippocampus, a brain region crucial for episodic memory, is not fully developed during infancy. However, research in rodents challenges this idea, showing that memory traces, or engrams, are formed in the infant hippocampus but become inaccessible over time. In humans, infants demonstrate memory through behaviors such as conditioned responses, imitation, and recognition of familiar stimuli. However, whether these abilities rely on the hippocampus or other brain structures remains unclear. In a study using fMRI to scan the brains of infants aged ~4 to 25 months while performing a memory task, Tristan Yates and colleagues aimed to determine whether the hippocampus in infants can encode individual memories. The memory task, adapted from a well-established method for adults, involved showing images to infants – faces, scenes, and objects – followed by a memory test based on preferential looking, all while undergoing neuroimaging. The findings show that the infant hippocampus has the capacity to encode memories of individual experiences beginning around 1 year of age, providing evidence that the capacity to form individual memories develops during infancy. According to the authors, the presence of encoding mechanisms for episodic memory during infancy – despite their ephemeral nature – suggests that infantile amnesia is more likely due to failures in memory retrieval mechanisms. These insights align with recent studies in rodents, which demonstrate that memories created during infancy can persist into adulthood but remain inaccessible for retrieval without direct stimulation of hippocampal engrams or reminder cues, the authors note. In a Perspective, Adam Ramsaran and Paul Frankland discuss the study in greater detail.

Canada is the happiest country in the G7, according to the World Happiness Report edited by a Simon Fraser University professor. 

While Canada remains the only G7 member in the Top 20, the U.S. slides to its lowest-ever position, according to Lara Aknin, distinguished professor of social psychology at SFU and an editor of the report released today. “The U.K. and the U.S. have fallen out of the top 20,” says Aknin. “Canada is one of the great global powers left in the top 20. Nordic countries remain at the top with Finland holding the number one spot for the eighth year in a row.” Other countries, like Mexico, have jumped up in the ranks, she adds.  

Americans have long believed that sports are one area in society that offers kids from all backgrounds the chance to succeed to the best of their abilities. But new research suggests that this belief is largely a myth, and that success in high school and college athletics often is influenced by race and gender, as well as socioeconomic status, including family wealth and education.