February 28, 2007
[ 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:...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:13 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 26, 2007
[ 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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 3:19 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 24, 2007
[ 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....
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 1:04 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 22, 2007
[ 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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:52 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 21, 2007
[ Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology ]
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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 2:06 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 20, 2007
[ Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling, Developmental Psychology ]
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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:04 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 19, 2007
[ 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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:50 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 16, 2007
[ 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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:00 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 15, 2007
[ Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:33 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 14, 2007
[ Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
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....
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:38 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks