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 […]
Clinically-Driven to Study Memory
Q&A with Muireann Irish Clinical populations can provide a wealth of data to cognitive neuroscientists working to understand the brain. By seeing what happens in the brain of someone who has a cognitive disorder, researchers can better identify the fundamental underlying mechanisms. That is certainly true for memory research, where individuals with dementia and Alzheimer’s […]
Going with the Flow: Mapping Information in the Human Brain
Q&A with Michael W. Cole Increasingly, cognitive neuroscientists are focusing on computation to better understand how information is stored and moves through the human brain. For Michael Cole, this work has included computer science at Apple and behavioral science at Berkeley, with him ultimately creating a cognitive neuroscience lab at Rutgers University that is taking […]
