HSE Distinguished Professor Sergey Karaganov Moderates Plenary Session at SPIEF
At the plenary session of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Russian President Vladimir Putin participated alongside the Presidents of Bolivia and Zimbabwe, Luis Alberto Arce Catacora and Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa. For the first time, a representative from HSE University—Sergey Karaganov, Academic Supervisor of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs and HSE’s distinguished professor—served as the moderator of the plenary session.
Scientists Rank Foreign Languages by Their Benefit for the Brain
An international team of researchers, with the participation of scientists from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, studied how the choice of a foreign language affects human cognitive abilities. It turns out that languages greatly differing from one's native language stimulate cognitive function at the initial stage of their study, while those similar to the native language have a delayed effect and help the brain work more efficiently at a higher level of proficiency in a foreign language. The results of the study have been published in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
Processing Temporal Information Requires Brain Activation
HSE scientists used magnetoencephalography and magnetic resonance imaging to study how people store and process temporal and spatial information in their working memory. The experiment has demonstrated that dealing with temporal information is more challenging for the brain than handling spatial information. The brain expends more resources when processing temporal data and needs to employ additional coding using 'spatial' cues. The paper has been published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.