June 30, 2008
Category: 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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:20 AM • 7 Comments •
June 27, 2008
Category: 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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:44 PM • 2 Comments •
June 25, 2008
Category: 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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 4:05 PM • 8 Comments •
June 17, 2008
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:47 AM • 10 Comments •
June 16, 2008
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:23 AM • 1 Comments •
June 13, 2008
Category:
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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:48 AM • 0 Comments •
June 12, 2008
Category:
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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:34 AM • 9 Comments •
June 9, 2008
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:43 PM • 0 Comments •
June 6, 2008
Category: 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...
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Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:34 PM • 0 Comments •