Friday, November 30, 2007

Brain changes associated with congenital amusia

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About four percent of the population has congenital amusia, a lifelong disability that prevents otherwise normal functioning individuals fro...

Roach Robots

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Here is a moment of visual relief:
Thursday, November 29, 2007

Genetic variation in the enhancement of intelligence by breastfeeding.

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It's the environment AND the genes... Caspi et al. provide a fascinating example of how genetic differences can moderate the effects of ...

Pay me for my content!

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This is the title of a brief Op-Ed piece by Jaron Lanier, a well known guru of the information age, in the Nov. 20 N.Y. Times. It is worth ...
4 comments:
Wednesday, November 28, 2007

How our brains process inequity in rewards.

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This work suggests that the calculation of social standing - as indexed by payment - may be an unconscious and automatic process in the brai...

Monkeys judge inequity like humans

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DeWaal and collaborators expand on previous observations to show that capuchin monkeys get really pissed off if they worked harder for a re...
2 comments:
Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Varieties of denial...

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Benedict Carey writes a nice piece in the Nov. 20 New York Times about the utility of - and evolutionary rationale for - mild forms of denia...
1 comment:

Do you really want to know your own genome?

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Nicholas Wade offer a brief essay in the Nov. 16 New York Times which notes several companies, such as DeCode Genetics , 23andMe , and Navi...
Monday, November 26, 2007

A gradient of representational hierarchy in the prefrontal cortex.

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Badre and D'Esposito have designed a set of tasks requiring increasingly abstract representations, each level requiring the classing ...
1 comment:

Memories play back on fast forward during sleep

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It is know that correlations of nerve activity that are observed during learning sequence tasks replay during sleep, presumably to enhance ...
Friday, November 23, 2007

Kewl Bio-inspired Robotics...

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The Nov. 16 issue of Science has a special section on Robotics. I thought this graphic from the article by Pfeifer et al. - "Self-Or...
1 comment:

Want to reduce risky behavior? Just pass a tiny current across your forehead.

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Another brave new world item (from Fecteau et al. ) - just what you need for your juvenile delinquent teenager! All you have to do is hoo...
1 comment:

Most popular consciousness articles...

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For October 2007, from the ASSC archives (from which 49638 papers were downloaded from 69 countries!). 1. Rosenthal, David (2007) Conscious...
Thursday, November 22, 2007

Predicting election outcomes in 100 milliseconds!

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Another example of a quick judgment turning out to be more accurate than a considered one... Ballew and Todorov showed study participants ...

Socialization between toddlers and robots

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How's this for a (horrific) vision of the future! The abstract from Tanaka et al. , followed by one figure from the paper: A state-of-th...
Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Observing rat brains as they look to the future

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An emerging view is that the hippocampus is essential to imagining the future as well as remembering the past (which makes a lot sense, sinc...

Japanese Gardens

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This picture from a stroll yesterday in the Morikami Japanese Gardens in Boca Raton, Florida. An iguana is on the lawn to the right of the t...
2 comments:
Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Our optimism bias - brain correlates

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Sharot et al. examine the tendency of most of us to imagine more optimistic outcomes than can be justified by sober appraisal. A moderate a...

Impairment of action chains in autism.

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When we observe the start of an action sequence that can end in two possible ways (in the figure shown a piece of food is placed in the mout...
Monday, November 19, 2007

Distinguishing true versus illusory memories with brain imaging.

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Kim and Cabeza show that true versus illusory memories held with high certainty depend on different neural mechanisms. Here is their abstr...