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Chris Chatham is a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University.
January 30, 2009
[ 
, Cognitive Neuroscience ]
A lot has been written about domain-general processing in prefrontal cortex, and a very old lesson often gets overlooked: there are very basic hemispheric asymmetries (particularly in PFC) that divide information processing by modality. A very nice study by Morimoto...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:52 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 29, 2009
[ , Computational Modeling ]
It's been said that psychology is a primitive discipline - stuck in the equivalent of pre-Newtonian physics. Supposedly we haven't discovered the basic principles underlying cognition, and are instead engaged in a kind of stamp collecting: arguing about probabilities that...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:28 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 27, 2009
[ , Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
Reductionism in the neurosciences has been incredibly productive, but it has been difficult to reconstruct how high-level behaviors emerge from the myriad biological mechanisms discovered with such reductionistic methods. This is most clearly true in the case of the motor...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:22 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 23, 2009
[ Link Posts ]
Refining the Turing Test: If it looks like a human, plays like a human, fights like a human, it's probably a .... Using your own child in developmental research: An ethical issue? Mice, math and drugs: On science without understanding....
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:12 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 20, 2009
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
An astonishing recent discovery in computational neuroscience is the relationship between dopamine and the "temporal differences" reinforcement learning algorithm (which Jake describes wonderfully here, and I've described in a little more detail here). The essential principle is that the difference...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:26 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 14, 2009
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology ]
A recent study reveals why some people perceive illusory colors when presented with digits: they confuse the magnitude of the digit with the luminance of the color.
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:29 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 12, 2009
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience ]
Recent work indicates that the after-effects of response inhibition cannot be reduced to attentional capture, supporting the existence of the controversial construct of inhibition.
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:08 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 9, 2009
[ , Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling, Developmental Psychology ]
A new artificial neural network revives an old debate on the benefits of constraints in learning.
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:36 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 8, 2009
[ , Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Neuroscience ]
An early classic in computational neuroscience was a 1993 paper by Elman called "The Importance of Starting Small." The paper describes how initial limitations in a network's memory capacity could actually be beneficial to its learning of complex sentences, relative...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:00 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 7, 2009
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling, Developmental Psychology ]
The ability to suppress unwanted thoughts and actions is thought (by some) to be crucial in your ability to control behavior. However, alternative perspectives suggest that this emphasis on suppression or "inhibition" is misplaced. These perspectives, largely motivated by computational...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:30 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
