Nonevidence for temporal asymmetry

Scientists often assume that the human brain is inherently designed for prediction. But there have been precious few behavioral studies giving evidence for this thesis.
Jones and Pashler of UCSD attempt to create a model for this in their recent paper, by looking at whether individuals are more skilled at prediction or retrodiction. In their experiment, [...]

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Myelin decay leads to the decline of myriad behavioral functions

A large study from the Semel Institute for Neuroscience at UCLA recently looked at the brain-related changes that cause deficiencies of certain behavioral activities as humans age.
The researchers tested subjects, aged 20-80, on a number of behavioral tasks. The fine finger movement task required subjects to rotate a pin between their forefinger and thumb with [...]

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Directly controlling a functionless arm with cortical neurons

One way for quadriplegic patients to feed themselves and perform other motor activities is to connect an interface to neural populations, and by using a complicated algorithm decode task-oriented activity and determine the parameters necessary for these external devices to work. In a fascinating experiment from the Washington National Primate Research Center published in Nature, [...]

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Cognitive robot research as a vehicle into human thought

Commercial robotics research in Japan is essentially an inevitability as the population there ages and as technology improves. In her 2006 paper, Kayoko Ishii suggests that cognitive scientists should piggyback on this inevitability and use these robots as an opportunity to deepen our understanding of human thought.
She cites a definition of computational neuroscience as “to [...]

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Introduction to independent component analysis

You can find a good one here. Note that at first he describes the process geometrically for a 2 dimension data set, and then jumps to matrices when he describes the hypothetical 128 electrode EEG data set. This is why we use matrices–to conduct data analysis in dimensions that we cannot easily visualize or chart. [...]

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Mechanism for neural attenuation in attentional blink

If humans see two objects in quick succession (less than 700 ms), they are only able to focus on one of them. This phenomenon is a specific type of the more general “information processing bottleneck” found in many cognitive systems.
Prior research has suggested that this deficiency in human processing is due to “later” mechanisms such [...]

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Dynamic modeling when the brain is at rest

Brain modeling is certainly a recent field, as fMRI and EEG methods have not become fully mainstream until about 15 years ago, from what I can tell. But most of that brain modeling has been concerned with modeling the brain when it is performing some goal oriented task, such as playing chess or recognizing an [...]

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The ethical implications of a perfect lie detector

Despite their rampant use in popular culture, polygraph tests are highly unreliable, producing an accuracy rate barely better than chance. And the fMRI attempts are probably doomed too; we just don’t currently have enough knowledge about which brain regions would “light up” when somebody was not telling the truth.
But what if? I think the applications [...]

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