Now on ScienceBlogs: "Investigative science journalism" and books I like to read [All of My Faults Are Stress Related]
[ over time, across species, and cross-platform ]
Chris Chatham is a grad student at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
:[ , Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
How many times did Pavlov ring the bell before his dogs' meals until the dogs began to salivate? Surely, the number of experiences must make a difference, as anyone who's trained a dog would attest. As described in a brilliant...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:00 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience ]
Don't think of a white bear. Doesn't work so well, does it? Yet under some circumstances, people appear to be able to do precisely this: as described last week, young adults are thought (by some) to actually suppress the neural...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:35 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience ]
The cognitive neurosciences have had high frequency oscillations on the brain: so called "gamma-waves", as recorded on the scalp, have been linked to working memory processes (via their interaction with slower "theta waves"), to cognitive insight, and even to consciousness....
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:28 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience ]
By many current theories, we accomplish control over behavior by using the prefrontal cortex to "bias" the competitive dynamics playing out in the rest of the brain. By some models, this bias is positive - it helps the goal-relevant representations...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:18 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience ]
A new study suggests that physically stepping backwards may be associated with gains in the ability to deal with problematic situations. As newly reported in Psychological Science (hat tip to Hannah) by Koch, Holland, Hengstler & Knippenberg, people were better...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 5:09 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
Every now and then, I read some science from some other dimension. That is, the methods are so unusual, the relevant theories so fringe, or the conclusions so startling that I feel like the authors must be building on work...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 12:25 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience ]
There are three on-off light switches on the wall of the first floor of a building. One of the switches is initially off and controls an incandescent bulb in a lamp on the third floor of the building. The other...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 2:17 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[ , Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
Most computational models of working memory do not explicitly specify the role of the parietal cortex, despite an increasing number of observations that the parietal cortex is particularly important for working memory. A new paper in PNAS by Edin et...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:26 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience ]
A number of previous behavioral and neuroimaging experiments, as well as computational models, support the idea that people can filter the contents of memory and perception so as to focus on only the information that's currently relevant. For example, in...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 10:27 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[ , Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
One theoretical model of the prefrontal cortex posits that we can achieve goal-directed behavior via "biased competition" - that is, representations of our current goals and context are maintained in the prefrontal cortex and exert an influence on downstream areas,...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 11:27 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Latest science stories | More at nytimes.com
4:43 AM, 07.06.2009
12:40 AM, 07.04.2009
2:24 AM, 07.03.2009
6:21 AM, 07.04.2009
2:50 PM, 06.30.2009
