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296 records returned

Outsourcing neuroimaging data analysis Implications for scientific accountability and issues in the public interest.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19846333 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - October 18, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

The description-experience gap in risky choice.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article reviews work across three experiential paradigms. Converging findings show that when people make decisions based on experience, rare events tend to have less impact than they deserve according to their objective probabilities. Striking similarities in human and animal experience-based choices, ways of modeling these choices, and their implications for risk and precautionary behavior are discussed. PMID: 19836292 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - October 13, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Modeling the auditory scene: predictive regularity representations and perceptual objects.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Predictive processing of information is essential for goal-directed behavior. We offer an account of auditory perception suggesting that representations of predictable patterns, or 'regularities', extracted from the incoming sounds serve as auditory perceptual objects. The auditory system continuously searches for regularities within the acoustic signal. Primitive regularities may be encoded by neurons adapting their response to specific sounds. Such neurons have been observed in many parts of the auditory system. Representations of the detected regularities produce predictions of upcoming sounds as well as alternative...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - October 11, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

A cognitive neuroscience hypothesis of mood and depression.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Although mood has a direct impact on mental and physical health, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying mood regulation is limited. Here, I propose that there is a direct reciprocal relation between the cortical activation of associations and mood regulation, whereby positive mood promotes associative processing, and associative processing promotes positive mood. This relation might stem from an evolutionary pressure for learning and predicting. Along these lines, one can think of mood as a reward mechanism that guides individuals to use their brains in the most productive manner. The proposed framework has man...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - October 8, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Building social cognitive models of language change.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Studies of language change have begun to contribute to answering several pressing questions in cognitive sciences, including the origins of human language capacity, the social construction of cognition and the mechanisms underlying culture change in general. Here, we describe recent advances within a new emerging framework for the study of language change, one that models such change as an evolutionary process among competing linguistic variants. We argue that a crucial and unifying element of this framework is the use of probabilistic, data-driven models both to infer change and to compare competing claims about socia...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - October 5, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Towards a functional neuroanatomy of pleasure and happiness.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The pursuit of happiness is a preoccupation for many people. Yet only the pursuit can be promised, not happiness itself. Can science help? We focus on the most tractable ingredient, hedonia or positive affect. A step toward happiness might be gained by improving the pleasures and positive moods in daily life. The neuroscience of pleasure and reward provides relevant insights, and we discuss how specific hedonic mechanisms might relate to happiness or the lack thereof. Although the neuroscience of happiness is still in its infancy, further advances might be made through mapping overlap between brain networks of hedonic ...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - September 23, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Torturing the brain On the folk psychology and folk neurobiology motivating 'enhanced and coercive interrogation techniques'Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19781978 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - September 22, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Topographic maps in human frontal and parietal cortex.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Retinotopic mapping of functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) responses evoked by visual stimuli has resulted in the identification of many areas in human visual cortex and a description of the organization of the visual field representation in each of these areas. These methods have recently been employed in conjunction with tasks that involve higher-order cognitive processes such as spatial attention, working memory, and planning and execution of saccadic eye movements. This approach has led to the discovery of multiple areas in human parietal and frontal areas, each containing a topographic map of visual space. In thi...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - September 13, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Herding in humans.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Herding is a form of convergent social behaviour that can be broadly defined as the alignment of the thoughts or behaviours of individuals in a group (herd) through local interaction and without centralized coordination. We suggest that herding has a broad application, from intellectual fashion to mob violence; and that understanding herding is particularly pertinent in an increasingly interconnected world. An integrated approach to herding is proposed, describing two key issues: mechanisms of transmission of thoughts or behaviour between agents, and patterns of connections between agents. We show how bringing together...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - September 10, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Light as a modulator of cognitive brain function.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Humans are a diurnal species usually exposed to light while engaged in cognitive tasks. Light not only guides performance on these tasks through vision but also exerts non-visual effects that are mediated in part by recently discovered retinal ganglion cells maximally sensitive to blue light. We review recent neuroimaging studies which demonstrate that the wavelength, duration and intensity of a light exposure modulate brain responses to (non-visual) cognitive tasks. These responses to light are initially observed in alertness-related subcortical structures (hypothalamus, brainstem, thalamus) and limbic areas (amygdala...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - September 10, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

The emergence of multisensory systems through perceptual narrowing.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
According to conventional wisdom, multisensory development is a progressive process that results in the growth and proliferation of perceptual skills. We review new findings indicating that a regressive process - perceptual narrowing - also contributes in critical ways to perceptual development. These new data reveal that young infants are able to integrate non-native faces and vocalizations, that this broad multisensory perceptual tuning is present at birth, and that this tuning narrows by the end of the first year of life, leaving infants with the ability to integrate only socio-ecologically-relevant multisensory sig...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - September 9, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

A parietal-premotor network for movement intention and motor awareness.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
It is commonly assumed that we are conscious of our movements mainly because we can sense ourselves moving as ongoing peripheral information coming from our muscles and retina reaches the brain. Recent evidence, however, suggests that, contrary to common beliefs, conscious intention to move is independent of movement execution per se. We propose that during movement execution it is our initial intentions that we are mainly aware of. Furthermore, the experience of moving as a conscious act is associated with increased activity in a specific brain region: the posterior parietal cortex. We speculate that movement intentio...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - September 9, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

From automaticity to control in bilinguals.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19748303 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - September 9, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Does Cognitive Science Need Kernels?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Kernel methods are among the most successful tools in machine learning and are used in challenging data analysis problems in many disciplines. Here we provide examples where kernel methods have proven to be powerful tools for analyzing behavioral data, especially for identifying features in categorization experiments. We also demonstrate that kernel methods relate to perceptrons and exemplar models of categorization. Hence, we argue that kernel methods have neural and psychological plausibility, and theoretical results concerning their behavior are therefore potentially relevant for human category learning. In particul...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - August 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Perceived social isolation and cognition.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Social species, from Drosophila melanogaster to Homo sapiens, fare poorly when isolated. Homo sapiens, an irrepressibly meaning-making species, are, in normal circumstances, dramatically affected by perceived social isolation. Research indicates that perceived social isolation (i.e. loneliness) is a risk factor for, and may contribute to, poorer overall cognitive performance, faster cognitive decline, poorer executive functioning, increased negativity and depressive cognition, heightened sensitivity to social threats, a confirmatory bias in social cognition that is self-protective and paradoxically self-defeating, heig...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - August 30, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

The study of animal metacognition.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article reviews this new area of comparative inquiry and describes significant empirical milestones, remaining theoretical millstones and the prospects for continuing progress in a rapidly developing area. This research area opens a new window on reflective mind in animals, illuminating its phylogenetic emergence and allowing researchers to trace the antecedents of human consciousness. PMID: 19726218 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - August 30, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Allocating functions to fiber tracts: facing its indirectness.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19716755 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - August 26, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Language, thought, and color: Whorf was half right.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The Whorf hypothesis holds that we view the world filtered through the semantic categories of our native language. Over the years, consensus has oscillated between embrace and dismissal of this hypothesis. Here, we review recent findings on the naming and perception of color, and argue that in this semantic domain the Whorf hypothesis is half right, in two different ways: (1) language influences color perception primarily in half the visual field, and (2) color naming across languages is shaped by both universal and language-specific forces. To the extent that these findings generalize to other semantic domains they su...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - August 26, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Please don't underestimate the ventral pathway in language.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19716753 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - August 26, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Expectation (and attention) in visual cognition.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Visual cognition is limited by computational capacity, because the brain can process only a fraction of the visual sensorium in detail, and by the inherent ambiguity of the information entering the visual system. Two mechanisms mitigate these burdens: attention prioritizes stimulus processing on the basis of motivational relevance, and expectations constrain visual interpretation on the basis of prior likelihood. Of the two, attention has been extensively investigated while expectation has been relatively neglected. Here, we review recent work that has begun to delineate a neurobiology of visual expectation, and contra...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - August 26, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

The Neurocircuitry of Impaired Insight in Drug Addiction.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
More than 80% of addicted individuals fail to seek treatment, which might reflect impairments in recognition of severity of disorder. Considered by some as intentional deception, such 'denial' might instead reflect dysfunction of brain networks subserving insight and self-awareness. Here we review the scant literature on insight in addiction and integrate this perspective with the role of: (i) the insula in interoception, self-awareness and drug craving; (ii) the anterior cingulate in behavioral monitoring and response selection (relevant to disadvantageous choices in addiction); (iii) the dorsal striatum in automatic ...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - August 26, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Varieties of altruism in children and chimpanzees.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Recent empirical research has shed new light on the perennial question of human altruism. A number of recent studies suggest that from very early in ontogeny young children have a biological predisposition to help others achieve their goals, to share resources with others and to inform others of things helpfully. Humans' nearest primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, engage in some but not all of these behaviors: they help others instrumentally, but they are not so inclined to share resources altruistically and they do not inform others of things helpfully. The evolutionary roots of human altruism thus appear to be mu...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - August 26, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

The SCP is not specific enough to represent conscious content.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19709920 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - August 23, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Response to Koch: Elaborations on the SCP hypothesis.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19709919 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - August 23, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Hidden cognitive states revealed in choice reaching tasks.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Perceptual and cognitive processes have largely been inferred based on reaction times and accuracies obtained from discrete responses. However, discrete responses are unlikely to capture dynamic internal processes, occurring in parallel, and unfolding over time. Recent studies measuring continuous hand movements during target choice reaching tasks reveal the temporal evolution of hidden internal events. For instance, the direction of curved reaching trajectories reflects attention, language representations and the spatial number line, in addition to interactions between the ventral and dorsal visual streams. This eluci...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - July 29, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Perceptual and memory constraints on language acquisition.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A wide variety of organisms employ specialized mechanisms to cope with the demands of their environment. We suggest that the same is true for humans when acquiring artificial grammars, and at least some basic properties of natural grammars. We show that two basic mechanisms can explain many results in artificial grammar learning experiments, and different linguistic regularities ranging from stress assignment to interfaces between different components of grammar. One mechanism is sensitive to identity relations, whereas the other uses sequence edges as anchor points for extracting positional regularities. This piecemea...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - July 29, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Control: conscious and otherwise.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Social psychologists have shown human decisions to be sensitive to numerous ordinary, possibly nonconscious, situational contingencies, motivating the view that control is largely illusory, and that our choices are largely governed by such external contingencies. Against this view is evidence that self-control and goal-maintenance are regularly displayed by humans and other animals, and evidence concerning neurobiological processes that support such control. Evolutionarily speaking, animals with a robust capacity to exercise control - both conscious and nonconscious - probably enjoyed a selective advantage. Counterbala...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - July 29, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Speech perception when the motor system is compromised.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19646917 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - July 28, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Theories about 'theories': where is the explanation? Comment on Waxman and Gelman.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19646916 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - July 28, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Response to Wilson: What does motor cortex contribute to speech perception?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19646915 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - July 28, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Response to Sloutsky: Taking development seriously: theories cannot emerge from associations alone.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19646914 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - July 28, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

A common role of insula in feelings, empathy and uncertainty.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Although accumulating evidence highlights a crucial role of the insular cortex in feelings, empathy and processing uncertainty in the context of decision making, neuroscientific models of affective learning and decision making have mostly focused on structures such as the amygdala and the striatum. Here, we propose a unifying model in which insula cortex supports different levels of representation of current and predictive states allowing for error-based learning of both feeling states and uncertainty. This information is then integrated in a general subjective feeling state which is modulated by individual preferences...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - July 27, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Corticocentric myopia: old bias in new cognitive sciences.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article highlights the conceptual bias at the root of this corticocentric view of the human brain, and emphasizes its negative implications in current practices in the cognitive neurosciences. The aim of this article is to suggest that the 'corticocentric' view of the human brain is also a myopic view because it does not let us see that the 'higher' functions of the brain might in fact depend on the integrity of its 'lower' structures. PMID: 19595625 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - July 9, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

The free-energy principle: a rough guide to the brain?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article reviews a free-energy formulation that advances Helmholtz's agenda to find principles of brain function based on conservation laws and neuronal energy. It rests on advances in statistical physics, theoretical biology and machine learning to explain a remarkable range of facts about brain structure and function. We could have just scratched the surface of what this formulation offers; for example, it is becoming clear that the Bayesian brain is just one facet of the free-energy principle and that perception is an inevitable consequence of active exchange with the environment. Furthermore, one can see easily how...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - June 23, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

The neural bases of multistable perception.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Multistable perception is the spontaneous alternation between two or more perceptual states that occurs when sensory information is ambiguous. Multistable phenomena permit dissociation of neural activity related to conscious perception from that related to sensory stimulation, and therefore have been used extensively to study the neural correlates of consciousness. Here, we review recent work on the neural mechanisms underlying multistable perception and how such work has contributed to understanding the neural correlates of consciousness. Particular emphasis is put on the role of high-level brain mechanisms that are i...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - June 17, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Concurrent brain-stimulation and neuroimaging for studies of cognition.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Neuroimaging can address activity across the entire brain in relation to cognition, but is typically correlative rather than causal. Brain stimulation can target a local brain area causally, but without revealing the entire network affected. Combining brain stimulation with concurrent neuroimaging allows a new causal approach to how interplay between extended networks of brain regions can support cognition. Brain stimulation does not affect only the targeted local region but also activity in remote interconnected regions. These remote effects depend on cognitive factors (e.g. task-condition), revealing dynamic changes ...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - June 17, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

'If' and the problems of conditional reasoning.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
'If' is a puzzle. No consensus has existed about its meaning for over two thousand years. Here, we show how the main psychological theories deal with the seven crucial problems that it raises. These competing explanations treat 'if' as though it was a term in a formal logic, or as eliciting the construction of a mental model of the world, or as an instruction to suppose that a proposition holds. The solution to 'if' would be a major step towards understanding how people reason, and towards implementing a computer program that can reason in a human way. We argue that the mental model theory is closer to resolving the pu...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - June 17, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

The fMRI signal, slow cortical potential and consciousness.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
As functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has become a driving force in cognitive neuroscience, it is crucial to understand the neural basis of the fMRI signal. Here, we discuss a novel neurophysiological correlate of the fMRI signal, the slow cortical potential (SCP), which also seems to modulate the power of higher-frequency activity, the more established neurophysiological correlate of the fMRI signal. We further propose a hypothesis for the involvement of the SCP in the emergence of consciousness, and review existing data that lend support to our proposal. This hypothesis, unlike several previous theories of ...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - June 14, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Why color synesthesia involves more than color.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimuli can trigger experiences in non-stimulated sensory dimensions. The literature has focused on forms of synesthesia in which stimuli (e.g. music, touch or numbers) trigger experiences of color. Generally missing, however, is the observation that synesthetic colors are often accompanied by the experience of other surface properties such as texture (e.g. a visual experience of linen, metal, marble, velvet, etc). Current frameworks for synesthesia focus only upon the involvement of brain regions such as the V4 color complex. Here, we propose an expanded framework that i...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - June 11, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Response to Altmann: Adaptive forgetting by decay or removal of STM contents?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19524480 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - June 10, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Evidence for temporal decay in short-term episodic memory.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19524479 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - June 10, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Early word-learning entails reference, not merely associations.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of classic tensions concerning the fundamental nature of human knowledge and the processes underlying its acquisition. This tension, especially evident in research on the acquisition of words and concepts, arises when researchers pit one type of content against another (perceptual versus conceptual) and one type of process against another (associative versus theory-based). But these dichotomies are false; they rest upon insufficient consideration of the structure and diversity of the words and concepts that we naturally acquire. As infants and young children establish categories...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

The comparative study of mental time travel.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
People regularly travel through time mentally to remember and reconstruct past events and to anticipate and plan future events. We suggest that a bi-cone structure best describes human mental time travel (MTT) abilities. Experiments with scrub-jays, rats and non-human primates have investigated whether MTT is uniquely human by examining the abilities of these animals to remember what, where and when an event occurred and to anticipate future events. We argue that animal memory for when an event happened must be distinguished from memory for how long ago it happened to properly evaluate parallels with human capabilities...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Adaptation by binding: a learning account of cognitive control.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Cognitive control refers to the ability to repress our instantaneous urges in favor of more appropriate responses. Current debate concerns whether cognitive control effects that are studied in the laboratory (e.g. Stroop tasks) actually reflect the operation of a cognitive control system (adaptation theory) or instead merely reflect side effects of feature binding processes (binding theory). The two perspectives can be integrated by conceptualizing cognitive control as resulting from interactions between binding processes (as instantiated in Hebbian learning) and arousal. Conflict situations such as Stroop incongruent-...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Hypnotic suggestion and cognitive neuroscience.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The growing acceptance of consciousness as a legitimate field of enquiry and the availability of functional imaging has rekindled research interest in the use of hypnosis and suggestion to manipulate subjective experience and to gain insights into healthy and pathological cognitive functioning. Current research forms two strands. The first comprises studies exploring the cognitive and neural nature of hypnosis itself. The second employs hypnosis to explore known psychological processes using specifically targeted suggestions. An extension of this second approach involves using hypnotic suggestion to create clinically i...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

(Micro)Saccades, corollary activity and cortical oscillations.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In natural vision, attention and eye movements are linked. Furthermore, eye movements structure the inflow of information into the visual system. Saccades, where little vision occurs, alternate with fixations, when most vision occurs. A mechanism must be in place to maximize information intake during fixations. Oscillatory synchrony has been proposed as a mechanism for rapid and reliable communication of signals, subserving cognitive functions such as attention and object identification. We propose that saccade-related corollary activity has a crucial role in anticipatory preparation of visual centers, which interacts ...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Social psychology as a natural kind.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Although typically defined as the study of how people and groups interact, the field of social psychology comprises several disparate domains that make only indirect contributions to understanding interpersonal interaction, such as emotion, attitudes and the self. Although these various phenomena seem to have little in common, recent evidence indicates that the topics at the core of social psychology form a natural group of domains with a common functional neuroanatomy, centered on the medial prefrontal cortex. That self-referential, attitudinal, affective and other social phenomena converge on this region might reflec...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Much ado about eye movements to nothing: a response to Ferreira et al.: Taking a new look at looking at nothing.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19403327 [PubMed - in process]
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Seeing slow and seeing fast: two limits on perception.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Video cameras have a single temporal limit set by the frame rate. The human visual system has multiple temporal limits set by its various constituent mechanisms. These limits seem to form two groups. A fast group comprises specialized mechanisms for extracting perceptual qualities such as motion direction, depth and edges. The second group, with coarse temporal resolution, includes judgments of the pairing of color and motion, the joint identification of arbitrary spatially separated features, the recognition of words and high-level motion. These temporally coarse percepts might all be mediated by high-level processes....
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - April 30, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

Attention training and attention state training.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The ability to attend and to exercise cognitive control are vital aspects of human adaptability. Several studies indicate that attention training using computer based exercises can lead to improved attention in children and adults. Randomized control studies of exposure to nature, mindfulness and integrative body-mind training (IBMT) yield improved attention and self-regulation. Here, we ask how attention training and attention state training might be similar and different in their training methods, neural mechanisms and behavioral outcomes. Together these various methods lead to practical ways of improving attention a...
Source: PubMed: "Trends Cogn Sci"[ta... - April 30, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Source Type: journals

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