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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 • 13 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 • 5 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, 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
[ , Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Modeling ]
A principal insight from computational neuroscience for studies of higher-level cognition is rooted in the recurrent network architecture. Recurrent networks, very simply, are those composed of neurons that connect to themselves, enabling them to learn to maintain information over time...
Posted by Chris Chatham at 2:57 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
[ , 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
[ , 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
[ , 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
[ , 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
[ , 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
