Appraisals of Cognitive Neuropsychology

Image from; http://i215.photobucket.com/albums /cc67/healthypetnut/sleep-1.jpg Are you a morning lark, or a night owl?  This could impact your cognitive and neural performance. This study by Schmidt et al., is an extension of work by the same group first published in Science   in 2009. So, first to briefly review the original  Science paper; the authors, tested people who were morning and evening types (according to chronotype questionnaires, melatonin levels and polysomnography) at optimal and non-optimal times (i.e. synchronous and asynchronous times relative to chronotype).  They found that fast responses on a psychomotor vigilance task, (indicating greater vigilance) was associated with more BOLD activity at synchrony. The effects were observed in Locus Coeruleus and anterior hypothalamus (the location of the suprachiasmatic nucleus or "master clock" of the body), and provided initial evidence for observable time of day effects measured with f...

Yes, this isn't a review of an article or neuroscience topic as such (more of those soon).  That said, I've found the following pieces of software have become indispensable to me as a researcher - and what's more, they're free. I started using Mendeley (a reference and bibliographic organizer) a couple of years ago and was using Endnote (C) at the time.  I've found that as time has passed, Mendeley has become increasingly user friendly and my envy for those with the Mac software " Papers " has decreased exponentially.  This software practically does it all: import PDFs and it will automatically rename them according to your preference (mine are all author, year, title) which makes finding references later a breeze.  All your references will be saved to a single directory (which you can further subdivide into folders according to author name, year, title, or journal).   There is also in-text citation integration for wor...

Typically, young adults who are asked to ignore distracting information (i.e. inhibit it), are quite capable of doing exactly that.  They tend to perform well on the attended task and show little to no memory for items that are presented as distraction (which they were asked to ignore).  This has usually been taken as evidence that when tested implicitly for encoding distractors, young adults under normal conditions demonstrate excellent ability to filter these out and prevent access to working memory (i.e. Gazzaley et al., 2008; Lustig, Hasher, & Zacks, 2007). The upshot is that young adults supposedly are more able to focus on what matters (the task at hand), but may not have access to the information they were asked to block out since it was supposedly filtered out before it could be incorporated into a memory trace. This is where things get interesting...  Hoffman et al., claim that in fact this type of information is  indeed accessible - scientists ...

Image from  http://www.homecarephoenixnow.com/ A recent review of the effects of age on episodic and working memory by Nyberg et al., (2012) has taken the interesting view that rather than focusing on cognitive and brain reserve, scientists and clinicians should instead look at 'maintenance'. Typically, reserve is taken to mean some physiological (in the case of brain reserve), or cognitive/social/contextual (in the case of cognitive reserve) advantage that allows for the maintenance of brain function in the face of decline due to pathology or disease. By way of example, older adults who have been lifelong balanced bilinguals (meaning that they speak both languages equally often) are more likely to to show preserved cognitive abilities despite showing MCI or AD pathology. These same individuals while holding on to normalcy longer, also experience a more rapid onset and decline suggesting that their 'reserve' actually masks the pathology and ironically may preve...

I'm back & am  hoping to be posting more regularly (once a week is my current goal).  My previous posts were done two years ago when I was taking a course on neuroethics.  While I found it very thought provoking, likely the content of this blog will be changing a bit.  For the past six months I've been reviewing articles for f1000.com , and really enjoyed the process - it's also part of the motivation to start blogging more as f1000 is reserved for articles that are truly commendable.