As a ballet dancer, Emily Avery has always had a great appreciation for people’s ability to execute complex movements, recall choreography, and internalize intricate musicality. Her love of dance is what first drew her to the field of cognitive neuroscience, where a growing body of research is using neuroimaging and computational techniques to study working […]
Models of Our Selves Reflected in Our Friends
Just like when an architect builds a scale model of a building, friends in your close-knit social circle build representational models of you. That’s how Robert Chavez, a social cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oregon, describes the neural representations we have of our friends. “And just like the architectural model, others’ representation of you […]
Communication Control: The Brain Activity that Monitors Our Speech
When we communicate with others, we are constantly monitoring our speech and theirs — taking in multiple external cues — to best engage in meaningful conversation. Despite the multidimensional aspects of speech monitoring, most studies on the topic to date have focused on how we produce a string of accurately sequenced sound units rather than […]
Bring in the Laughs: Investigating Laughter as a Social Signal
For Qing Ceci Cai, a Chinese Ph.D. student at University College London, social laughter has a very personal connection. “As a Chinese student immersing in this very different British culture, I normally fail to understand British humor,” she explains. “So most of the time when I hang out with my friends, I capture the exact […]
Controlling the Urge to Relieve Pain
The internal battle between the need to act and the need to suppress an action is something I have been through multiple times this summer: trying to suppress the urge to scratch itchy mosquito bites. Such a state is common in everyday life and also important to several clinical disorders but has yet to be […]
Sharpening Understanding of How the Deaf Brain Sees
Q&A with Stephen Lomber We often see it in superhero movies: When people are deprived of one sense, they develop superhuman powers in another sense. While those depictions may be exaggerated, the underlying premise has a real scientific basis. When the brain is deprived of input from one sense, such as hearing, it often compensates […]
Exploring the “Dark Side” of Brain Imaging
Q&A with Robert Thibault Guest Post by David Mehler Neuroimaging. For many people, this term invokes the thought of a photographer taking a snapshot of brain activity and then looking at the still. Cognitive neuroscientists, however, know this couldn’t be further from the truth. Image parameters, data cleaning, and statistical analyses all affect the final […]
Why Sleep?: Watch Matthew Walker’s CNS 2019 Keynote
To kick off the 26th annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, Matthew Walker (UC Berkeley) gave audience members a detailed look at the myriad physiological and cognitive ways sleep influences people — and the dire consequences associated with not getting enough sleep. His presentation touched on learning, memory, aging, Alzheimer’s disease, and education, as […]
Watch: The Relation Between Psychology and Neuroscience from CNS 2019
Whether we study single cells, measure populations of neurons, characterize anatomical structure, or quantify BOLD, whether we collect reaction times or construct computational models, it is a presupposition of our field that we strive to bridge the neurosciences and the psychological/cognitive sciences. Our tools provide us with ever-greater spatial resolution and ideal temporal resolution. But […]
A Note to Worried Graduate Students: There’s Still Hope
Guest Post by Shelby L. Smith As I sat in an audience of students listening to a panel of professional researchers and data scientists at the CNS annual meeting in San Francisco, I couldn’t help but notice two things: 1) Trainees are exceptionally worried about their futures, and 2) trainees have an army of forces […]
