Tag «IQ»

The Roland Garros tennis tournament, one of the most prestigious in the world, began on May 26. The prize money for this year's French Open totals nearly 54 million euros, with athletes competing in both singles and doubles events. In doubles tennis, choosing the right strategy for a match is crucial. Athletes' ability to adapt to the dynamics of the match and strategically choose the server can earn the pair up to 5% more points, according to Nikolai Avkhimovich, doctoral student and research fellow at the Laboratory of Sports Studies of the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences. A paper with the study findings has been published in Applied Economics.

Researchers at the HSE Centre for Bioelectric Interfaces have studied how physiological parameters change in individuals who start practicing meditation. It turns out that when novices learn meditation, they do not experience relaxation but tend towards increased physical tension instead. This may be the reason why many beginners give up on practicing meditation. The study findings have been published in Scientific Reports.

Scientists at the AI Research Centre and the AI and Digital Science Institute of the HSE Faculty of Computer Science applied classical reinforcement learning algorithms to train generative flow networks (GFlowNets). This enabled significant performance improvements in GFlowNets, which have been employed for three years in tackling the most complex scientific challenges at modelling, hypothesis generation, and experimental design stages. The results of their work achieved a top 5% ranking among publications at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics AISTATS, held on May 2-4, 2024, in Valencia, Spain.

An international team of authors, including researchers at HSE University have examined decision-making by nationals of 11 countries. It turns out that people universally tend to make more mistakes when confronted with the need for quick decision-making and expected to weigh the pros and cons of available options on their own. However, when the advantages and disadvantages of each option are known to them, the behaviour of individuals from different nationalities varies depending on their cultural level of risk aversion. The paper has been published in Nature Human Behaviour.

Researchers from HSE University have conducted a study among graduate students to identify which life choice they consider the most important. All respondents linked their successes and failures to education. Decisions in other significant areas, such as relationships with loved ones or choosing a place to live, were often viewed through the lens of education. The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

A new study by researchers at the HSE Language and Brain Centre and the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences can change the current understanding of language acquisition in young children, revealing that the boundaries between typical performance and developmental disorders are not as clear-cut as previously believed. Having tested more than 100 Russian-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 7, the researchers discovered that some children diagnosed with developmental language disorders (DLD) performed on par with their peers who did not have speech and language diagnoses. The study has been published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

Researchers at the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences examined the level of effort that professional football players are willing to exert during a match in absence of financial incentives. It appears that the primary factors driving players to strive harder for victory are the strength of the opponent and the significance of the match for the club. This is particularly noticeable in derby matches between teams from the same city, such as the Moscow derby between CSKA and Spartak on April 25, 2024. The study has been published in the Journal of the New Economic Association. 

Although the North Caucasus played a crucial role in the ancient colonisation of Eurasia and the shaping of its cultural and genetic heritage, the genetic history of its indigenous cultures has not yet been fully explored. Scientists have, for the first time, conducted deep sequencing of ancient DNA from members of the Koban culture that emerged in the late Bronze Age in the North Caucasus and compared this genetic data with that of modern populations of the Caucasus. Their findings confirm the role of Koban culture carriers as an ancient genetic bridge between the Bronze and Iron Ages in the North Caucasus. The study has been published in the European Journal of Human Genetics.