Guest Post by Amitai Shenhav, Princeton University Tonight, after dinner, I will go out for ice cream at one of my favorite spots in Princeton. I will salivate in anticipation of my visit, delighting in all of the options that await me. I will carry that excitement with me as I enter the shop and examine all […]
Let’s Get Fired Up: Is Seeing Brain Activity the Ultimate Motivator?
From coaches to self-help books, everyone has advice for how to get motivated to accomplish a task. But what if you could simply see how your brain reacts to different motivation strategies and then pick the best one? New research is finding that showing people their brain activity levels could be the key to firing […]
The Social Circuits that Track How We Like People and Ideas
CNS 2014 Press Release Boston – April 7, 2014 – Whether at the office, dorm, PTA meeting, or any other social setting, we all know intuitively who the popular people are – who is most liked – even if we can’t always put our finger on why. That information is often critical to professional or […]
Pennies for Treats: Dieting Through Brain Training
What’s the first treat you pull out of your candy bag on Halloween? Probably your favorite guilty pleasure… but what if you could use pennies to train yourself to pick a candy you might not like the most but that might be healthier? A new study finds that we may be able to train our […]
From Conditioning Monkeys to Drug Addiction: Understanding Prediction and Reward
Breakthroughs in cognitive neuroscience: Highlighting influential research from the past 20 years This series will explore influential papers in cognitive neuroscience, as measured by the number of times they are cited each year. The papers featured are just a sampling of many important works in the field over the past 20 years. Life for all […]
Using reward to improve visual awareness in stroke patients: Q&A with Paresh Malhotra
For stroke patients whose visual awareness is impaired on one side, merely offering a reward improves their attention. That is the result of a recent study that tested how stroke patients respond to stimuli when offered a financial incentive. As reported in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, the researchers gave a simple test […]
