A long expected blog post

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.

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Reaction times (RTs) - what to do with them?

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, ...

Video games allow for multitasking? A review of "Improving multi-tasking ability through action videogames"

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...

Dopamine helps the brain change gears: A review of "Dopamine-supports coupling of attention-related networks."

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...

Appraisals of Cognitive Neuropsychology

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