CNS 2022: Q&A with Oriel FeldmanHall Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had to navigate decision-making in everchanging, new social contexts – deciding when to mask, when to cancel an event, who to include in social gathering, and more. The ability to constantly adapt decisions under changing circumstances, in part, relies on the ability to […]
Remembering Under Threat
CNS 2022: Q&A with Vishnu “Deepu” Murty Just as attitude can affect how someone feels when undertaking a task, so too can mindset affect what someone remembers from an experience. Think about a hike, for example. If all goes as planned, you reach the summit, making memories of the sites and sounds along the way. […]
Using Neuroscience to Improve Justice and Outcomes for Youth
CNS 2022: Q&A with B.J. Casey Looking back on her career to date, what stands out for B.J. Casey are the tremendous strides cognitive neuroscientists have made in conducting large-scale studies that get at what is happening inside the human brain. She thinks back to early studies done with only a few subjects and the […]
From Social Media Use to Social Isolation: New Insights About the Adolescent Brain
CNS 2022: Q&A with Sarah-Jayne Blakemore Sarah-Jayne Blakemore studies topics that are on many people’s minds daily, especially those of us who are parents of teenagers: the adolescent brain. Working to understand the development of the brain in adolescents is a labor of love that began when she was studying schizophrenia during her PhD and […]
Evolving Laboratory Tasks to Resolve Distraction
CNS 2022 Q&A with John Jonides Every day, we are constantly bombarded with sights, sounds, and other stimuli that threaten to distract us from specific tasks. Over the last several decades, cognitive neuroscientists have made tremendous progress in understanding the brain processes at work when people exert cognitive control to overcome potential distractions. They have […]
Turning to Ornithology to Understand the Neural Basis of Expertise
Hans Op de Beeck remembers as a child being intrigued by another student in his class who excelled in all subject areas but struggled with one specific task: mentally rotating drawings in 3-D for a technical drawing class. “He just could not do it, and hardly passed the tests despite a lot of hard work […]
It’s the Quality Not Just the Quantity of Words That Counts in Aphasia
Aphasia resulting from stroke and brain injury creates a variety of language deficits, including a reduced ability to engage in conversations. And while researchers have investigated many aspects of this condition, little work has looked at the detailed characteristics of the words that aphasia patients are able to produce. In a new study, Reem Alyahya […]
Investigating the Adolescent Brain Through Film Watching
Adolescence provides a unique opportunity for neuroscientists to understand an important in-between step in brain development. Straddling the worlds between adulthood and childhood, adolescents often are expected to take on more responsibility and independence, yet their brains are still not fully matured. In a new study, cognitive neuroscientists sought to investigate the adolescent brain through a […]
Age-Related Differences in How the Sleeping Brain Affects Future Thinking
Researchers are in a renaissance of understanding how sleep affects health and cognition. A big shift is occurring from thinking about sleep as a reactive, or homeostatic process, to now also recognizing the prospective role of the sleeping brain. And a new study is providing further evidence about how the brain prioritizes storing information during […]
Movement and Art Perception in Parkinson’s Patients
When I have taken my children to art museums in the past (pre-COVID), they loved to strike the poses they saw in the sculptures and paintings around them, mimicking the positions and actions that inspired the works. While many of us adults may not act out pieces of art, we may be mentally simulating the […]
