[ over time, across species, and cross-platform ]
Chris Chatham is a grad student at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
February 28, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Yesterday I was invited to give this 15-minute presentation (PPT, PDF) to LearningRX about recent perspectives on working memory limitations, and their potential for informing cognitive training and enhancement programs. In case you're curious, here's a list of references:...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:13 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 26, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Memory, defined as "any lasting effect of experience," is an overly broad term. Those with damage to the hippocampus lose their long-term memory but retain the ability to maintain conversations (at least for short periods of time). But new perspectives...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 3:19 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 24, 2007
Category: Link Posts
The story of a patient who awoke after a 20-year coma, induced by traumatic brain injury. Epidemic proportions of TBI in soldiers returning from Iraq: a new problem. Second chance to live: a new blog written by a TBI survivor....
Posted by Chris Chatham at 1:04 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 22, 2007
Category: Developmental Psychology
Children are famously bad at remembering to do things - for example, taking out the trash. What exactly is the developmental trajectory of the ability to remember and execute planned actions (known as prospective memory)? Although the effects of traumatic...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:52 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 21, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Findings in the laboratory do not always apply to the real-world - a myriad of factors can influence real-world phenomena, and scientists actively seek to eliminate many of them in their laboratories. But ecological validity can be particularly difficult to...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 2:06 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 20, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
In the middle of the work day, you realize you'll need to stop at a store on your way home from work. Your ability to actually do so, hours later, relies on what some psychologists call "prospective memory." Although prospective...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:04 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 19, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
The distributions of reaction times are always positively skewed, which seems to reflect two independent processes: a normal gaussian distribution of reaction times, in addition to an exponentially-decaying distribution of a few very long trials. Measures of this reaction time...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:50 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 16, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
How do the symptoms of ADHD relate to the circuitry underlying executive function and working memory? An in-press article at Neuropsychopharmacology investigates the roles of dopamine and norepinephrine in ADHD, with evidence from both behavioral and simulated experiments. This post...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:00 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 15, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Dopamine is probably the most studied neurotransmitter, and yet the neuroscience literature contains a huge variety of perspectives on its functional role. This post summarizes a systems-level perspective on the function of dopamine that has motivated several successful drug studies...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:33 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 14, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
In a 2006 Psychopharmacology article, Niv et al. suggest that while transient dopamine release is frequently modeled computationally (as encoding reward-prediction error, for example, or as gating information into working memory) the role of more constant dopamine release is not....
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:38 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
