CNS 2021 Q&A with Anne Collins If there is one thing the past year of the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us, it’s that people learn and adapt to new situations all the time. We are never really starting from scratch. “We have a whole set of strategies that we rely on to adapt quickly compared […]
Do Visual Aids Assist Musical Training?
As a professional flutist, Ioanna Zioga has often wondered how people learn music. She herself has experienced many different musical training techniques from various musicians. “Some would draw figures on a whiteboard to visually represent the music; others would sing melodies; others would play the music themselves on the flute in order for me to […]
Modeling Learning Across the Lifespan
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 […]
Revealing the Cognitive Sorcery of Human Intelligence
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 […]
Mind Melding: Understanding the Connected, Social Brain
CNS 2019 Press Release March 26, 2019 – San Francisco – Parents may often feel like they are not “on the same wavelength” as their kids. But it turns out that, at least for babies, their brainwaves literally sync with their moms when they are learning from them about their social environment. In a new […]
Learning What to Learn: Lessons from Cognitive Neuroscience for Education
How do we learn what to learn? This fundamental question drives the work of Rachel Wu at the University of California, Riverside. Before we can learn anything, we need to know what to pay attention to. From infancy, people are bombarded with distractions that can make that challenging. While there is a wealth of cognitive […]
Enhancing the Sleeping Brain
Guest Post by Sadie (Sarah) Witkowski, Northwestern University As one of five children, my mom has plenty of stories about her and her siblings’ misadventures. One of my favorites revolves around my “weird” Uncle Dorsey and his early scientific endeavors. When my mom was about 8 years old, her older brother slipped a tape player under […]
The Effects of Stress on Learning Vary by Memory Type
The other day, I reset my password for a social media site. When I went to login today, I inadvertently entered the old password. When that happened, I was using my automatic, “stimulus-response” memory, a rigid, habit-like memory. When I then remembered I had changed my password, I tapped into a different type of memory, […]
Memory, Language, Action: Watch Big Ideas in Cognitive Neuroscience
Does the human brain process memory like a computer processes information? What enables human language with all its nuances and complexities? How does flexibility in the brain give rise to learning? These were just a few of the questions explored at Big Ideas in Cognitive Neuroscience, a special session at this year’s CNS meeting in […]
Curiosity and Reward as Motivational Drivers in Learning
Your mental state before and after learning plays a critical role in how well your remember something. This may seem obvious, but scientists are only just uncovering the neural processes underpinning this effect. At the CNS meeting today, Matthias Gruber of Cardiff University discussed two important mental states: when receiving reward and when curious. Recent […]
