Appraisals of Cognitive Neuropsychology

Doctor of philosophy: that title carries a lot of weight.  It speaks of years  of struggle and deep thought on a very specific topic.  W ithin the academic community t he conferral of the title implies  a certain standard and a sense that we've been through the same rigorous process and made it out the other side (or at least will, for those of us still going through the process).   By talking to attendees of international conferences, I have reached the distinct impression that PhD programs vary incredibly - even within the same field.  Nowhere is this difference greater than the Europe/North-America divide.   In North America, a doctorate is a nominally four year program (assuming you're in the sciences - we won't speak of the humanities where it's not unusual for some people to take seven years to finish).  This is usually  after   the conferral of a masters degree meaning that the typical North American Doctoral student w...

W ould you believe that playing video games could make you more likely to succeed as a pilot? There's been quite a bit of colloquial evidence on multitasking and task-switching floating around the internet recently, thanks in no small part to work by Ophir et al., (2009) who showed that people who are habitual media-multitaskers (i.e. those annoying people who text while watching a movie or even worse while driving) tend to perform worse on a wide variety of cognitive measures of attention.  They concluded that people who are chronic media multitaskers have a "leaky filter", and as such cannot block out irrelevant (and distracting) information.  This agrees nicely other theories of attention, and particularly inhibitory theory (Hasher & Zacks, Michael C. Anderson, Gazzaley). One reason that multitasking has come under such scrutiny is that it is now encouraged and even expected in many professions and by many employers.  Even in situations where multitasking...

I t's raining today, and I've just emerged from reading a selection of articles on time memory in animals with a view to answering the question "can animals experience episodic memory?"  Turns out that's a pain to answer since there are plenty of mechanisms that can masquerade as reliving an event including learning semantic rules and intervals .  The upshot is we still don't know.  The nice thing about my field however is that when theory tends towards the nebulous - and it frequently does, I can focus on methods for a while to take my mind off things... So, I've run an experiment and have a whole set of reaction times that I'm itching to analyze.  What are my options?  Any good statistician will tell you to plot your data first.  In fact, should you go to see them for advice, they will, with a vague air of distressed incredulity, tell you to go off and plot your data.  Usually I feel slightly ashamed for not having done this already, ...

Memory can be biased - here's how... As an aside, I always like to see the authors of the papers - that way, if I should ever see them at a conference, I can capitalize on my terrible source memory and approach them saying "don't I know you from somewhere?".  It also helps attribute, recognition where it is due.   Katherine Duncan Arhanti Sadanand Lila Davachi I attended a talk given by Katherine Duncan at the Rotman Research Institute (where I work).  The talk, was largely based on the findings from the Science paper that came out in July.  The talk was great - and just as importantly, so is the paper and its findings. The idea comes from neuroscience, yet the paper itself is entirely behavioral - something some of the senior faculty liked - that it was still possible to get a psychology/neuroscience paper into Science  without resorting to newfangled methods like fMRI.   Even without fMRI, the paper i...

Before we begin, some background information... It seems that networks and the idea of connectivity is on everybody's minds these days (pardon the pun).  It's a fairly safe bet to say that nearly everyone affiliated with neuroscience has more than a passing familiarity with the default mode and dorsal attention networks (i.e. see Raichle et al., 2001).  These networks are anticorrelated which is to say that when one is being more heavily accessed, the activity in the other is suppressed.  Broadly, the default mode is active at rest, during mind wandering and when thinking about the autobiographical past - it has been described as being related to internally directed attention.  The dorsal attention or task positive network on the other hand is engaged when attention needs to be directed outwards at a cognitively demanding task or situation.  From Dang et al., 2012 What about the frontoparietal cognitive control network?  This network was discove...

Available at Amazon. So, you want to analyze fMRI data?  Here's a good place to start.   Historically, researchers wanting to learn fMRI techniques have had to apprentice themselves to one or several senior researchers who have mastered the techniques.  This is still arguably the best way to familiarize oneself with everything since learning Linux/Unix and how to navigate several image processing packages can get a bit hairy in the beginning and a guiding hand is very much appreciated.   That said, nearly everyone I know in this field also gets a textbook.  Huettel's Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.   This is *the* book to get if you really want to know the ins and outs of MRI physics, analysis, preprocessing etc.  But it is very dense.  Huettel's book is meant to be approached chronologically with new information building on what you learned in previous chapters making it an excellent textbook for a course on this subject. ...