The Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) is excited to announce that we have joined the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS). As many of our members will be aware, FABBS works to advance the sciences of the mind, brain, and behavior by advocating for our fields and representing our research community in Congress, […]
Shelby Smith remembers feeling inspired and humbled the first time she attended the professional development panel at an annual CNS meeting. “There is just something about being in a room filled to the brim with other students where the only purpose of being there is to show you that you’re not alone and that there […]
Q&A with Michael Tomasello When Michael Tomasello was an undergraduate student at Duke University studying developmental psychology, he studied the theories of Jean Piaget, a psychologist who thought evolutionarily. “He was looking at children like they were a different species,” Tomasello recalls. “He would always emphasize that they have their own way and own logic, […]
Q&A with Catherine Hartley At a special session on the relation between psychology and neuroscience at last year’s CNS conference in San Francisco, Catherine Hartley said: “Even if we can predict behavior, if we don’t know how it works, we likely have not achieved our goals.” While computational algorithms and tools may help researchers predict […]
Q&A with Sam Gershman In the last decade, computational techniques have expanded the toolkit for scientists across disciplines. In neuroscience, computational models are increasingly rendering “visible things that were previously invisible,” says Samuel Gershman, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard University. “Computational modeling is not a niche activity. It’s the same theory-building activity in which all […]
Q&A with Marlene Behrmann For the past 30 years, Marlene Behrmann has been on a mission to answer some of the biggest questions in cognitive neuroscience about how visual function in the brain maps onto structure. Along her journey, she has explored a wide range of topics, including autism, migraines, aphasia, agnosia, and more. “These […]
As a ballet dancer, Emily Avery has always had a great appreciation for people’s ability to execute complex movements, recall choreography, and internalize intricate musicality. Her love of dance is what first drew her to the field of cognitive neuroscience, where a growing body of research is using neuroimaging and computational techniques to study working […]
Just like when an architect builds a scale model of a building, friends in your close-knit social circle build representational models of you. That’s how Robert Chavez, a social cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oregon, describes the neural representations we have of our friends. “And just like the architectural model, others’ representation of you […]
When we communicate with others, we are constantly monitoring our speech and theirs — taking in multiple external cues — to best engage in meaningful conversation. Despite the multidimensional aspects of speech monitoring, most studies on the topic to date have focused on how we produce a string of accurately sequenced sound units rather than […]
For Qing Ceci Cai, a Chinese Ph.D. student at University College London, social laughter has a very personal connection. “As a Chinese student immersing in this very different British culture, I normally fail to understand British humor,” she explains. “So most of the time when I hang out with my friends, I capture the exact […]
