[ over time, across species, and cross-platform ]
Chris Chatham is a grad student at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
November 30, 2007
Category: Link Posts
A lot of good brain blogging lately; some beautiful drawings from the era of phrenology, some crazy kids high on scopolamine, James Flynn's current thoughts on intelligence, and more......
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:09 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 29, 2007
Category: Artificial Intelligence
The world wide web can be understood as a giant matrix of associations (links) between various nodes (web pages). At an abstract level, this is similar to human memory, consisting of a matrix of associations (learned relationships, or neuronal connections)...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:01 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
The ability to actively maintain more information in memory, known as "working memory," seems to benefit performance in a variety of tasks. One idea is that these tasks require controlled attention, allowing for better control over behavior. But there's a...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 1:25 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 19, 2007
Category: Computational Modeling
Geoff Hinton has a new TiCS paper describing recent advances in algorithms used to train multilayered neural networks. First, a little background: neural networks of a sufficient size can calculate any mathematical function (an infamous proof among neural network modelers)....
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:49 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 16, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Neuroesthetics seeks to identify the neural basis of aesthetic experience - how does the brain give rise to the perception of beauty? A new paper in Network indicates that artists consistently create works which contain the same statistical properties as...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:20 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 9, 2007
Category: Developmental Psychology
Asperger's disorder is a subtype of autism, characterized by deficits in social interaction, delays in nonverbal communication and possibly also deficits in nonverbal IQ (such as on a test known as Block Design). However, a new study in Brain and...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:10 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 7, 2007
Category: 
Speech recognition remains a daunting challenge for computer programmers partly because the continuous speech stream is highly under-determined. For example take coarticulation, which refers to the fact that the auditory frequencies corresponding to a given letter are strongly influenced by...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:06 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 5, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Aging is associated with some slow but measurable forms of cognitive decline, but there is debate over the type of cognitive changes taking place. A recent study by Rush, Barch & Braver uses a series of interesting tasks to clarify...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 9:26 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 4, 2007
Category: Link Posts
A first-hand report of caloric vestibular stimulation - to treat Body Integrity Identity Disorder, in which patients often desire to have large parts of their bodies amputated. Ambien, a sleep drug recently discovered to awaken some people from comas is...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:21 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 2, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Trueswell & Kim's paper in the Journal of Memory and Language describes a phenomenon known as "fast priming," in which a reading task is momentarily interrupted by a brief presentation of a "prime" word, usually lasting around 30 to 40...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:01 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
