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Chris Chatham is a grad student at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
June 30, 2008
[ 
, Cognitive Neuroscience ]
Attention training through meditation can reduce the duration of the "attentional blink" - in which detection of a first rare target causes people to be unaware of a second target presented soon after the first - according to research by...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:20 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 27, 2008
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience ]
As discussed earlier this week, meditation may be an alternative form of brain training - or "brain untraining" - that shows transfer to tasks requiring cognitive control. There have been a few updates to this fascinating line of research, not...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:44 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 25, 2008
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience ]
In a fascinating review of the cognitive neuroscience of attention, authors Raz and Buhle note that most research on attention focuses on defining situations in which it is no longer required to perform a task - in other words, the...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 4:05 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 17, 2008
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology ]
Kevin at IQ's Corner has blogged about a new paper in PNAS showing that "working memory" training can improve measures of fluid intelligence - a capacity long thought to be relatively insensitive to experience, and intricately tied to the most...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:47 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 16, 2008
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
In a recent issue of Science, Dahlin et al report the results of an executive function training paradigm focused on the process of mental updating. "Updating" is thought to be one of the core executive functions (as determined through confirmatory...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:23 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 13, 2008
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology ]
Children can be notoriously constrained to the present, but a fascinating article in JEP:HPP by Vallesi & Shallice shows exactly how strong that constraint can be: in a study with 4-11 year-olds, they show that only children older than about...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:48 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 12, 2008
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
Could something be perceived if there is no sensory system which is dedicated to it? For everyone except parapsychologists, the obvious answer is no - but this raises questions about the ability to perceive short temporal intervals, for which there...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:34 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 9, 2008
[ , Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
Working memory - the ability to hold information "in mind" in the face of environmental interference - has traditionally been associated with the prefrontal cortices (PFC), based primarily on data from monkeys. High resolution functional imaging (such as fMRI) have...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:43 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 6, 2008
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience ]
A variety of new cognitive neuroscience shows how our ability to ignore distractions - to "perceptually filter", in a sense - is based on a ventral attentional network, is related to working memory, and may be involved in putative inhibitory...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:34 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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