Tag "research projects"

When bidding in a competitive market, our brains use a special type of heuristic to adjust the price depending on the success of previous attempts to buy goods. Moreover, this learning mechanism involves not only the cerebral cortex, but the evolutionary ancient brain area of the striatum. This was the conclusion reached by neuroscientists from the HSE Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Research Center of Neurology (Moscow, Russia) in a study that was published in the European Journal of Neuroscience.

An international team of Russian and Belgian researchers has found out that space travel has a significant impact on the brain: they discovered that cosmonauts demonstrate changes in  brain connectivity related to perception and movement. Some areas, such as regions in the insular and parietal cortices, work more synchronously with other brain areas after the space flight. On the other hand,  connectivity of some other regions, such as the cerebellum and vestibular nuclei,  decreases. The results of the study were published in Frontiers in Physiology.

Europe wants to live in a democracy. This is especially true for residents of countries of Northern Europe, but less so for those of former socialist countries, especially Russia. While almost everyone has a positive attitude towards democracy, people have different understandings of it. Alla Salmina studied the relationship between attitudes and understandings of it using the data of 28 countries that participated in the European Social Survey (ESS). 

The Russian Science Foundation announced the results of its 2019 competitions for support from the Presidential Research Project Programme. One competition was for grants in support of research initiatives by early career researchers, and another was in support of research conducted by research groups headed by early career scholars.

Currently, the Russian art market is made up of more than 20 auction houses, about 100 major galleries, 9 big private collectors, and over 20 thousand professional artists. Though it shows a lot of promise, it still has yet to come into its own. Researchers of the HSE Centre of Development Institute studied the contemporary mechanisms in place for trading paintings, graphic art, photography and sculpture in Russia, and they published their findings in a paper, ‘The Russian Art Market: 2018’.

A public council for the independent evaluation of the quality of education conditions has been created at the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation. Alexander Milkus, Head of the HSE Laboratory for Educational and Youth Journalism, has been unanimously elected as its chair.

Inscriptions, symbols and shapes of tombstones and cemetery layouts carry important messages about society, its values and hierarchies. Research by HSE scholar Svetlana Malysheva reveals some of the things Soviet cemeteries can tell us about the USSR and its people.

Sound artist Robert Elias Stokowy of Berlin and Yulia Chernenko,lecturer at the HSE Faculty of Communications, Media, and Design, have initiated a joint German-Russian artistic research project entitled, ‘Phenomenology of Darkness’.

One of the most obvious changes that comes with ageing is that people start doing things more slowly. Numerous studies have shown that ageing also affects language processing. Even neurologically healthy people speak, retrieve words and read more slowly as they get older. But is this slowdown inevitable? Researchers from the Higher School of Economics have been working to answer this question in their article ‘No evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing in sentence processing’.

IQ.HSE continues its series of HSE* expert reports on the legal regulation of new technologies. The first article in the series dealt with artificial intelligence. Today’s article looks at self-driving vehicles.