Experiments with mice have found that inhibiting the production of kynurenic acid in the brain has dramatic benefits for cognitive performance.

Study shows the tools used to assess whether mental ability tests are biased couldn’t find bias when it was deliberately inserted, casting the fairness of common tests into doubt.

• The existence of specialized neurons involved in spatial memory has now been found in humans, and appear to also help with object location and autobiographical memory.

Providing support for a modular concept of the brain, a twin study has found that face recognition is heritable, and that it is inherited separately from IQ.

Findings from a survey of adolescents provides support for a theory that more intelligent people are more likely to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, and that these values include liberalism, atheism, and, in men, monogamy.

An imaging study reveals that different brain regions are involved in learning nouns and verbs.

A monkey study reveals that, although some neurons are specialized to recognize specific concepts, most are more generalized and these are usually better at categorizing objects.

• Several reports have come out in recent years on how recent events replay in the hippocampus, a process thought to be crucial for creating long-term memories. Now a rat study suggests that these replays are not merely echoes of past events, but may include possible events that never happened.