Appraisals of Cognitive Neuropsychology

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. ...

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...