Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have explored the regions of the brain where concrete and abstract concepts materialize. A new study now explores if people who grow up in different cultures ...

An insect's brain is capable of constructing and handling abstract concepts. It can even use two different concepts simultaneously in order to make a decision when faced with a new situation. This ...

Abstract concept learning refers to the ability of an animal to form rules or relations that transcend specific sensory features of individual stimuli and to apply these rules to novel situations.

Abstract concepts—such as justice, freedom or emotion—lack direct sensory referents and pose a central challenge to theories of mind and language. Traditional accounts have proposed that abstract ...

In a series of studies over more than 20 years, evolutionary biologists have demonstrated that paper wasps, despite their tiny brains, have an impressive capacity to learn, remember and make social ...

String theory, quantum gravity, time dilation. Why do these advanced physics concepts come easily to some of us but not others? The trope that the human brain didn’t evolve to understand advanced ...

Babies barely a few hours old seem to possess the ability to think of numbers as abstract concepts. Harvard University researchers say that babies barely a few hours old seem to possess the ability to ...

Scientists have discovered honeybees can understand the concept of zero, putting them in an elite club of clever animals that can grasp the abstract mathematical notion of nothing. By demonstrating ...

Wasps can tell the difference between pairs of stimuli that are the same or different, a task that requires the use of abstract concepts that only a small group of animals are known to grasp. The ...

At most schools a reading of Charlotte's Web might end with a bunch of little spiders made from pipe cleaners and a few tears at the poignancy of the story itself. At Preshil independent school, the ...