The cortex organizes sensory information to enable discrimination and generalization. As systematic representations of chemical odour space have not yet been described in the olfactory cortex, it remains unclear how odour relationships are encoded to place chemically distinct but similar odours, such as lemon and orange, into perceptual categories, such as citrus.

Previous research has suggested that distributional learning mechanisms may contribute to the acquisition of semantic knowledge. However, distributional learning mechanisms, statistical learning, and contemporary “deep learning” approaches have been criticized for being incapable of learning the kind of abstract and structured knowledge that many think is required for acquisition of semantic knowledge. In this paper, we show that recurrent neural networks, trained on noisy naturalistic speech to children, do in fact learn what appears to be abstract and structured knowledge.

Many studies have drawn conclusions that in English word recognition, native adult speakers tend to adopt the holistic processing strategy and a switch from analytic processing strategy to holistic one among children was also detected. Considering the huge differences between logographic Chinese characters and alphabetical English series of letters, it would be interesting to discuss – How does the Chinese native speakers process Chinese characters?

Research on meditation has been rising in the past decades. Mindfulness interventions have been applied to new settings such as schools, workplaces and military. Research studies claim that meditation leads to cognitive enhancement and helps with psychotic disorders. Studies support underlying cognitive benefits such as improved visual search, inhibitory control, executive control, meta-awareness, sustained attention and decrease in mind-wandering. Yet, these interventions can trigger benign and adverse effects based on psychological history of individuals.