BPR
developingintelligence | November 18, 2011In their wonderful Neuroimage article, Braun & Mattia present a comprehensive introduction to the possible neuronal implementations and cognitive sequelae of a particular dynamical phenomenon: the attractor state. In another excellent paper, just recently out in Frontiers, Itskov, Hansel and Tsodyks describe how such attractor dynamics may be insufficient to support working memory processing unless supplemented by rapid synaptic modification - a mechanism which has in fact been described neuroanatomically and previously utilized neurocomputationally to describe cognitive phenomena. To…
developingintelligence | September 12, 2011Owing to the low signal-to-noise ratio of functional magnetic resonance imaging, it is difficult to get a good estimate of neural activity elicited by task novelty: by the time one has collected enough trials for a good estimate, the task is no longer novel! However, a recent J Neurosci paper from Cole, Bagic, Kass & Schneider circumvents this problem through a clever design. And the design pays off: the results indicate that the widely-hypothesized anterior-to-posterior flow of information through prefrontal cortex may actually be reversed when unpracticed novel tasks need to be…
developingintelligence | September 12, 2011How do we detect important items in our environment? This crucial capacity has received less attention than one might think, and a number of extremely basic issues remain to be explored. For example, it has long been known that target probability has profound effects on the recruitment of the prefrontal cortex (such that lower-probability targets are associated with greater recruitment of both dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), it has been unclear whether this pattern arises due to the general probability of the class of "targets" or whether it's more stimulus-specific.
An…
developingintelligence | December 4, 2007How does memory help to accomplish moment-to-moment goal-directed action? Classic accounts, such as Baddeley's working memory model, suggest that there are separate storage and processing ("executive") mechanisms, whereas newer accounts (proposed by a variety of researchers) propose that storage and processing are intertwined in the form of maintained goal or context representations.
According to these newer theories, individual differences in the strength of goal representations can more or less efficiently "bias" perception and behavior, particularly in cases where habit or environmental…