Word: variants
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Everyone can learn from their mistakes - but some people have genes that may make it harder. That's the message from German researchers, writing in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science, who have shown how a common gene variant affects some people's ability to respond to, and learn from, the negative repercussions of their actions...
...depending on the symbol he had chosen. All men were equally good at learning to pick the symbols that won them a smiley face, but some men were worse than others at avoiding the ones that resulted in sad faces. Those men, it turns out, had a particular gene variant, or allele, that reduces the density of receptors for dopamine - a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in motivation, pleasure and addiction - in certain areas of the brain. Brain scans also showed significantly less activity in those areas in response to the sad-faced negative feedback...
...good news is that having the allele doesn't necessarily mean you can't learn from your mistakes. Although the men who had the genetic variant did show weaker responses to negative feedback, they did not perform markedly worse on the task at hand: They selected the good symbols from the bad about as often as participants who didn't have the allele. The results suggest that learning - though influenced by dopamine - is a complex process that involves much more than one kind of brain receptor. "It's just one factor that may contribute to some problems that might arise...
...city of Cambridge also uses a variant of instant-runoff voting to elect its nine city councillors and six School Committee members...
According to Kellaway, the term “transgender” refers to transsexuals, cross-dressers, and anyone who is gender-variant or perceived to be gender-variant...