Q&A with Damien Fair, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Recipient Although the global pandemic has slowed his lab’s data collection to a halt, COVID-19 has nothing on cognitive neuroscientist Damien Fair. In the middle of the global health crisis, he moved from Oregon Health & Science University to the University of Minnesota, began the Masonic Institute for […]
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 […]
Q&A with Robert Thibault Guest Post by David Mehler Neuroimaging. For many people, this term invokes the thought of a photographer taking a snapshot of brain activity and then looking at the still. Cognitive neuroscientists, however, know this couldn’t be further from the truth. Image parameters, data cleaning, and statistical analyses all affect the final […]
Summer is coming to an end, but imagine if your fun summer vacation experiences could later help you in addressing neuropsychological conditions. That’s a concept that inspires and motivates David Mehler, an MD/PhD student and cognitive neuroscientist at Cardiff University. “Imagine seeing a thermometer gauge that shows how strongly a specific part of your brain […]
Pixar’s Inside Out portrays memories as glowing individual spheres that we replay in our minds like a movie on a projector screen. But in real life, neuroscientists have found that memories are not compartmentalized into perfect little bubbles; they are represented over a largely distributed set of brain regions. And the same brain regions at […]
Guest Post by Nick Wan, Utah State University Imagine driving in a simulator while undergoing an fMRI. No, you won’t be lying down — this is not your typical large, chamber-like scanner. An instrument called functional near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS, is using a smaller, more portable design to record brain activity in more real-world settings. “It’s really that […]
Breakthroughs in cognitive neuroscience: Highlighting influential research from the past 20 years This series explores influential papers in cognitive neuroscience, as measured by the number of times they are cited each year. The papers featured are a sampling of many important works in the field over the past 20 years. This is the fourth in […]
Seeing a beautifully lit up image of the human brain is powerful – maybe too powerful, worry many scientists. But if you think that brain images are the most persuasive form of scientific evidence out there, think again, says a new study that examines how the public views neuroimaging. Members of the public are more […]
