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[ over time, across species, and cross-platform ]
Chris Chatham is a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University.
May 31, 2007
Imagination allows us to escape our current time, place, or perspective in favor of an alternative context, whether that may be fanciful or mundane. So imagination is a mechanism for specifying and maintaining a context that differs from our more...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:32 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 30, 2007
While the "modal model of memory" is still widely taught and accepted as a general theory, an enormous amount of recent research has focused on how short-term memory enables higher cognitive processes like those involved in planning, goals, and executive...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:50 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 29, 2007
[ Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling, Developmental Psychology ]
The capacity to use and manipulate symbols has been heralded as a uniquely human capacity (although we know at least a few cases where that seems untrue). The cognitive processes involved in symbol use have proven difficult to understand, perhaps...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:56 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 25, 2007
[ Link Posts ]
Highlights from recent brain blogging: First, a new edition of Encephalon. Physicalism and Panpsychism - a book review by Jerry Fodor. Looks like a pretty nice book... And here, Fodor explains mental representation to his aunt. Silicon smackdown - an...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 3:00 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 24, 2007
[ Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
Many will agree that algebra is difficult to learn - it involves planning, problem-solving, the manipulation of symbols, and the application of abstract rules. Although it's tempting to imagine a specialized region of the brain for each of these processes,...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:21 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 18, 2007
[ Link Posts ]
Recent highlights from the best in brain blogging: Who knew? These videos will tell you how the mind works (supposedly). The origins of the old myth that we use only 10% of our "brain power". A woman awakens from a...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:56 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 17, 2007
[ Book Reviews ]
Prospective memory is "remembering to remember." Despite the pervasiveness of this requirement in real-life, we know surprisingly little about the topic. In their new book, McDaniel & Einstein provide a direly needed review of this fascinating new field, providing important...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 9:33 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 16, 2007
[ Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
The analytic depth of cognitive neuroscience is, in many ways, a curse. Those aspects of high-level cognition most relevant to real-world applications are the least understood at a neurobiological level, and those mechanisms that are well-understood neurobiologically are too simple...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:21 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 15, 2007
[ Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology ]
It could be argued that any single level of scientific analysis is at once too simple (since there are always important emergent phenomena at higher levels) and also too complex (poorly-understood phenomena inevitably lurk at lower levels). If I wanted...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 9:48 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 14, 2007
Theories with the fewest assumptions are often preferred to those positing more, a heuristic often called "Occam's razor." This kind of argument has been used on both sides of the creationism vs. evolution debate (is natural selection or divine creation...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 2:33 PM • 48 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
