Have you had a bad day at work? If so, going for a long walk in the park will almost certainly help you de-stress. But it turns out that even small doses of outdoor exercise can have remarkable effects on mental health, report Jules Pretty and Jo Barton of the University of Essex (U.K.) in this issue of ES&T (Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI 10.1021/es903183r). In a meta-analysis of 10 studies, they ...

In both a behavioural and neuroimaging study, we examined whether memory performance and the pattern of brain activation during a word recognition task differed depending on the type of visual context presented during encoding. Participants were presented with a list of words, paired with either a picture of famous face, a famous scene, or a scrambled image, to study for a later recognition tes...

It has long been known that human vision is more sensitive to contours at cardinal (horizontal and vertical) orientations, compared with oblique orientations; this is the "oblique effect." However, the real-world relevance of the oblique effect is not well understood. Experiments here suggest that this effect is linked to scene perception, via a common bias in the image statistics of scenes. Th...

Infants' visual scanning of social scenes is influenced by both exogenously and endogenously driven shifts of attention. We manipulate these factors by contrasting individual infants' distribution of visual attention to the eyes relative to the mouth when viewing complex dynamic scenes with multiple communicative signals (e.g. peek-a-boo), relative to the same infant viewing simpler scenes wher...

Suppressing unwanted memories can impair their later recall. Recent work shows that this forgetting is achieved by at least two mechanisms supported by distinct neural systems: thought substitution and direct suppression (Benoit & Anderson, 2012). Here, we examined whether direct suppression, thought to be achieved by down-regulation of hippocampal activity, can disrupt memory of aversive scene...