The recently discovered neurons that keep track of time – so-called time cells – are gaining traction in the memory community. Audience members found out why at a session for the CNS meeting Monday, as several researchers presented the latest on how these cells encode memories over time in rats, humans, and other primates. Just as […]
CNS 2013 Press Release: Training the Brain to Improve on New Tasks
April 15, 2013 – San Francisco – A brain-training task that increases the number of items an individual can remember over a short period of time may boost performance in other problem-solving tasks by enhancing communication between different brain areas. The new study being presented this week in San Francisco is one of a growing […]
CNS 2013 Meeting: Controlling Emotional Response is Key to Treating Mental Illness
Everyone attending CNS 2013’s first symposium Sunday morning on the regulation of emotion and mental illness took part in a group belly laugh when James Gross played a video to open his talk. In the clip, a newscaster nervously interviews an animal handler holding a 5-foot snake. Unbeknownst to the viewers (and perhaps the newscaster), […]
CNS 2013 Meeting: Making Decisions Based on Context: A New Mechanism Gains Traction
The audience for Sunday morning’s keynote lecture at CNS 2013 got to play the part of monkeys during a talk by William Newsome of Stanford University, though our task was a bit easier than what his test monkeys usually experience. Normally, in Newsome’s experiment, monkeys have 750 milliseconds to determine either whether a flashing field […]
CNS 2013 Meeting: The Generation of – and Learning Process for – New Nerve Cells in Our Brains
Unlike in other organs in the body, in the adult brain, new cells form throughout our lifetimes – creating new opportunities to learn. Turns out that the same region of the brain where new nerve cells are generated is the same region of the brain involved in distinguishing events in our memories. Researchers are now […]
CNS 2013 Meeting: From the Pain of Financial Risk-Taking to Creativity Among Mixed-Handers
CNS 2013 Poster Preview Our willingness to take financial risks relates to our sensitivity to physical pain, according to new research being presented today at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) in San Francisco. The study is one of several highlighted in Saturday’s opening poster session, which also includes research on when […]
CNS 2013 Meeting: Monkeys Help to Make Sense of Our Decision-Making
“Studying how the brain makes decisions can help treat brain disorders of decision-making. It may eventually help us to improve the way we present information to people when they have to make decisions, like how to save for retirement or whether taxation is the best way to reduce consumption of addictive substances.” – Michael Platt […]
Our Fallible Memories in the Courtroom: Q&A with Daniel Schacter
“…cognitive neuroscience research could help jurors and other participants in the legal system to better understand why it is that memory does not operate like a video recorder, and why it is sometimes prone to error and distortion.” Neuroscience is in the legal spotlight more than ever before, with the courts increasingly considering science-based evidence […]
Understanding What Shapes Our Visual Reality: Q&A with William Newsome
“Anyone who works with monkeys on a day-in-day-out basis eventually asks him or herself a startling question: Exactly who is training whom here?” Our brains, not our eyes, are largely responsible for our visual reality. Although the eyes take and lightly process the pictures, it is our brains that reconstruct what we have seen from […]
The Genetics of Why Some People Remember Events Better than Others as They Age
As we age, our memories of autobiographical events often fade but some individuals are much better at remembering than others. A new study explores how our genetics result in some of these individual differences in memory retention – and finds that certain genes play an increasingly larger role in how much we forget as we […]
