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Chris Chatham is a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University.

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July 15, 2008

Tracing a Critical Path Through Human Memory

 BPR Artificial IntelligenceCognitive NeuroscienceDevelopmental Psychology ] 

To enhance any system, one first needs to identify its capacity-limiting factor(s). Human cognition is a highly complex and multiply constrained system, consisting of both independent and interdependent capacity-limitations. These "bottlenecks" in cognition are reviewed below as a coherent framework...

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July 14, 2008

Neglected Facets of Unilateral Neglect: Non-spatial Attention and the Parietal Lobe

 BPR Cognitive Neuroscience ] 

Most readers of this blog are probably familiar with "unilateral neglect," one of several behavioral manifestations of brain damage to the parietal lobe. Perhaps fewer readers are aware of other findings from unilateral neglect patients which are often omitted from...

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July 9, 2008

What Does Cognitive Training Do to Neural Activity?

 BPR Cognitive NeuroscienceDevelopmental Psychology ] 

How would an ideal behavioral method for cognitive enhancement actually affect the brain? Perhaps cognitive enhancement would be accompanied by more activity in the prefrontal cortex, indicating more successful engagement of control - or perhaps by less, indicating more efficient...

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July 7, 2008

Failures in Cognitive Training: Practice and The Stroop Task

 BPR Cognitive Neuroscience ] 

Training high-level cognition or "executive function" is not always successful. Interestingly, some of the least robust training effects come from one of psychology's most robust paradigms - the Stroop task....

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July 3, 2008

Attention: It's Not a Big Truck (What Does N-Back Training Actually Do?)

 BPR Cognitive Neuroscience ] 

Klaus Oberauer has a fascinating paper from 2006 which seems to have been ignored by the cognitive training community. Oberaurer demonstrates how improper counterbalancing, ignorance of the power-law of practice, and confounds in the design of memory load tasks can...

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July 2, 2008

Does Self-Selection Affect Meditation's Influence on Attention?

 BPR Cognitive Neuroscience ] 

Self-selection refers to the fact that certain kinds of people may be drawn to certain kinds of lifestyles or practices (including participation in human research). When the effects of those lifestyles/practices are observed scientifically, they are confounded with myriad other...

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July 1, 2008

Distraction and Meditation: Less Default Network, But A Similar Ventral Network Among Expert Meditators

 BPR Cognitive Neuroscience ] 

How does meditation experience functionally change the brain, and what effects does this have on distractibility? These are the questions addressed in a 2006 PNAS article from Brefczynski-Lewis et al, who compare expert meditators (between 10,000 and 54,000 hours of...

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