I can see it all in my mind like a mini-movie: my family and I eating breakfast at the kitchen table, pouring cereal, drinking juice and coffee, and chatting. The body positioning, senses, and actions are all vividly recreated in my mind’s eye. We all do it to some extent every day – mentally recreate […]
Guest Post by Sadie (Sarah) Witkowski, Northwestern University As one of five children, my mom has plenty of stories about her and her siblings’ misadventures. One of my favorites revolves around my “weird” Uncle Dorsey and his early scientific endeavors. When my mom was about 8 years old, her older brother slipped a tape player under […]
The other day, I reset my password for a social media site. When I went to login today, I inadvertently entered the old password. When that happened, I was using my automatic, “stimulus-response” memory, a rigid, habit-like memory. When I then remembered I had changed my password, I tapped into a different type of memory, […]
The Cognitive Neuroscience Society is adding its voice questioning the new policy that NIH has adopted that fails to distinguish between basic research and clinical trials. As a result of this policy, a wide array of basic research studies will be required to register as clinical trials starting in January 2018. The policy is described […]
Every day, we compare ourselves to others, both in person and increasingly online. Am I smarter than my friend? Am I nicer or friendlier? Such judgments require a type of “social reasoning” – first rating yourself and your friends and then making a comparison. Among adolescents, this type of thinking is even more common, with […]
Speaking at the Big Ideas in Neuroscience session at the recent CNS annual meeting, Angela Friederici of the Max Planck Institute discussed language as a unique human trait. Understanding of the words we use comes from different types of memories in different networks the brain. Neuroscientists often gain insight into these connections through individuals with […]
We all know intuitively that place shapes our everyday experiences. From the colors of the walls to the amount of light in the room, how we design buildings affects how we think, feel, and behave. A growing body of research is examining how architectural design affects us on the neural level. And a new research […]
At the CNS meeting last March in San Francisco, I learned a new term during Marcia Johnson’s Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions Award lecture: reality monitoring. Coined by Johnson, reality monitoring refers to how we distinguish what is real from what is imagined in our everyday lives. For some people, having an impairment in this seemingly […]
It’s Sunday morning and I am looking through tweets while watching the news. With smartphones now ubiquitous, such situation are increasingly common: taking in information with multiple interruptions, often by choice. In a new study, researchers studied this phenomenon on the neural level by having people watch movie clips in different combinations – finding significant […]
The very first way babies communicate is through gestures (well, in addition to crying, that is). They may express “I want that” as a distinct pointing toward an object. As people grow older, gestures are not abandoned, but both spoken and body language become more ambiguous. Oftentimes, adults will point and gesture while talking without […]
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