Now on ScienceBlogs: The Galaxy's Biggest Valentine
[ over time, across species, and cross-platform ]
Chris Chatham is a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University.
June 28, 2007
[ Cognitive Neuroscience, Comparative Psychology, Developmental Psychology ]
In 1948, Alan Turing wrote: "An unwillingness to admit the possibility that mankind can have any rivals in intellectual power occurs as much amongst intellectual people as amongst others: they have more to lose." Accordingly, comprehensive comparisons between the intellectual...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:56 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 27, 2007
[ Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
Though widely separated in terms of both neuroanatomical location and evolutionary development, there are surprising parallels between parietal cortex and the hippocampus: - Both structures are important for spatial cognition, although parietal cortex is thought to maintain a "self-centered" map...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 2:31 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 26, 2007
[ Link Posts ]
The best from recent cognitive/brain blogs: Suspect someone's lying to you? Ask for the story in reverse order. Psyblog also has some suggestions. A sober look at mind-reading fMRI pattern classification techniques over at Mind Hacks. Nabokovian reviews a new...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 4:49 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Can you move a single matchstick to form a valid mathematical statement equation? No sticks can be discarded, an isolated slanted stick cannot be interpreted as I (one), and a V (five) symbol must always be composed of two slanted...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 9:57 AM • 118 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 25, 2007
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has captured the popular imagination since its introduction in the early 1990s, at least partially because of the stunningly beautiful images it generates. Although it has mostly used to identify brain regions involved in specific...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:37 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 21, 2007
Though anatomically heterogenous, the human prefrontal cortex seems to perform a rather general function: it actively maintains context representations to guide and control behavior. What, then, is the reason for the anatomical diversity within this region of the brain? Some...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 2:50 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 18, 2007
[ Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
How does your brain represent the feelings and thoughts that are a part of conscious experience? Even the simplest aspects of this question are still a matter of heated debate, reflecting science's continuing uncertainty about "the neural code." The fact...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 1:57 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 13, 2007
What was your 6th birthday party like? If you successfully retrieved that memory, you may now be ever so slightly less able to remember your other childhood birthdays. A variety of behavioral evidence has shown that such "retrieval induced forgetting"...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:32 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 12, 2007
Children have often been claimed to blend reality and fantasy, but according to some this is a wild exaggeration of the truth. For example, renowned child researchers have written that "even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:16 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 11, 2007
Symbols redirect attention - in some ways, that is their intended purpose - but this "reorienting" is a surprisingly literal and involuntary effect. Even when we know symbols are irrelevant to our current circumstances, they still influence our behavior. A...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 1:47 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Orac 02.13.2012
ERV 11.26.2011
Orac 01.26.2012
PZ Myers 02.02.2012
Jason Rosenhouse 02.12.2012
