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Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Oxford
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Frontal brain damage makes decisions less biased

February 13, 2021 admin Leave a comment

Learning from reinforcement is a classic way to study how brain areas contribute to adaptive behaviour. The most frontal parts…

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Brain Commentary – Drugs affect subtypes of Parkinson’s disease differently

December 26, 2020 admin Leave a comment

In this article, I discuss the implications of new work from Hanneke Den Ouden’s lab. The authors subdivided Parkinson’s disease…

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Parkinson’s medication has opposite effects on two kinds of motivation

November 29, 2020 admin Leave a comment

Patients with Parkinson’s disease lack the brain chemical dopamine. Dopamine is thought to signal upcoming rewards, and this might explain…

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Are working memory and visual search windows into the same neural process?

October 1, 2020 admin Leave a comment

When you recall an item from memory, a prompt usually brings associated parts of that item into mind. Could this…

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Pupil size betrays contents of working memory

October 25, 2019 admin Leave a comment

When we hold several things in short-term memory, we can shift our attention internally between different features in memory. For…

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Dopamine can make our working memory more or less flexible

September 19, 2019 admin Leave a comment

Dopamine drugs are used to treat Parkinson’s disease, and alter a wide range of brain functions. One role of dopamine…

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Conjunctive coding neurons in prefrontal cortex

Neural model of working memory

July 29, 2019 admin Leave a comment

Is it possible to account for our patterns of short-term remembering and forgetting, and at the same time, make predictions…

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Why does it feel effortful to be precise?

April 2, 2019 admin Leave a comment

Our eye movements are controlled by a relatively simple circuit in the brainstem. Remarkably, it seems to operate with less…

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Recent Posts

  • Frontal brain damage makes decisions less biased February 13, 2021
  • Brain Commentary – Drugs affect subtypes of Parkinson’s disease differently December 26, 2020
  • Parkinson’s medication has opposite effects on two kinds of motivation November 29, 2020
  • Are working memory and visual search windows into the same neural process? October 1, 2020
  • Pupil size betrays contents of working memory October 25, 2019
  • Dopamine can make our working memory more or less flexible September 19, 2019
  • Neural model of working memory July 29, 2019
  • Why does it feel effortful to be precise? April 2, 2019

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    Sanjay ManoharFollow

    Cognition is a tool we use for understanding the brain around us.

    Sanjay Manohar
    PetitetPierrePierre Petitet@PetitetPierre·

    Happy to share this new paper in which we asked a simple question: what's the relationship between self-report measures of apathy and impulsivity? Turns out it depends on the domain considered!
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-84364-w

    Reply on Twitter 1366459020987490308Retweet on Twitter 136645902098749030811Like on Twitter 136645902098749030835
    MasudHusainMasud Husain@MasudHusain·

    Emerging findings from different patient groups suggest that impulsivity and apathy might co-occur. Here, with @PetitetPierre @JacquieScholl @BrainInTheMind @bahaatallah & Dan Drew, we show they also correlate in healthy people, but it's complicated:
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-84364-w

    Reply on Twitter 1366493679985307651Retweet on Twitter 136649367998530765114Like on Twitter 136649367998530765150
    Brain1878Brain@Brain1878·

    Pathological brain ageing in epilepsy and dementia: two sides of the same coin? New scientific commentary by Arjune Sen and Michele Romoli https://bit.ly/3u2A2Pw

    Reply on Twitter 1362327243448582144Retweet on Twitter 136232724344858214426Like on Twitter 136232724344858214448
    JohnPGrogan1John P Grogan@JohnPGrogan1·

    Our (with @BrainInTheMind) new preprint is up! https://psyarxiv.com/qkycj Do rewards motivate people to improve their working memory, and how does this motivation work? And what does this tell us about WM limits? Thread below. 1/7

    Reply on Twitter 1347595324882362372Retweet on Twitter 134759532488236237210Like on Twitter 134759532488236237231
    RIKEN_CBSRIKEN Center for Brain Science@RIKEN_CBS·

    New #preprint out from our new team leader Takuya Isomura📢
    https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.10.420547v2

    Reply on Twitter 1341320997035622405Retweet on Twitter 13413209970356224059Like on Twitter 134132099703562240524
    NeuroFidelityNeuroFidelity@NeuroFidelity·

    New paper out! "The human hippocampus and its subfield volumes across age, sex and APOE e4 status", by @micheleveldsman and @l_nobis, with @BrainInTheMind and @MasudHusain -- @uk_biobank @braincomms

    https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/advance-article/doi/10.1093/braincomms/fcaa219/6042143

    Reply on Twitter 1340574238391083008Retweet on Twitter 134057423839108300813Like on Twitter 134057423839108300845
    nzokaeiDr nahid zokaei@nzokaei·

    Amazing work, lead by the brilliant @JohnPGrogan1. For anyone out there in need of mixture modelling for 2D data! https://twitter.com/JohnPGrogan1/status/1337020203335610370

    Reply on Twitter 1337091906015293456Retweet on Twitter 13370919060152934564Like on Twitter 133709190601529345613
    JohnPGrogan1John P Grogan@JohnPGrogan1·

    Our new toolbox for using mixture modelling in 2D data (such as spatial WM tasks) is out! With @BrainInTheMind, @MasudHusain, @nzokaei, @agonistofmind, @LizCoulthard https://twitter.com/ARVOJOV/status/1336716210688434178

    Reply on Twitter 1337020203335610370Retweet on Twitter 133702020333561037012Like on Twitter 133702020333561037031
    Brain1878Brain@Brain1878·

    Ammann et al. report that primary motor cortex is disinhibited at all stages of Parkinson’s disease, including on the minimally affected side of drug-naïve patients. https://bit.ly/34TDfXa

    Reply on Twitter 1329349947745964032Retweet on Twitter 132934994774596403216Like on Twitter 132934994774596403244
    agonistofmindSean James Fallon@agonistofmind·

    Very much looking forward to this. Some great speakers lined up. Still time to register. https://twitter.com/VidaConference/status/1323678996534497280

    Reply on Twitter 1328381824809267203Retweet on Twitter 13283818248092672031Like on Twitter 13283818248092672032
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    Recent work

    • Frontal brain damage makes decisions less biased
      Learning from reinforcement is a classic way to study how brain areas contribute to adaptive behaviour. The most frontal parts of the brain probably contribute at a very high, abstract level. In this study (Manohar et al. Cortex 2021), we asked how confident people are in what they have learned. Underside of a human brain Healthy people are biased by previous choices, and by competing information, when making these “meta-cognitive” estimates. However, patients with selective damage […]
    • Brain Commentary – Drugs affect subtypes of Parkinson’s disease differently
      In this article, I discuss the implications of new work from Hanneke Den Ouden’s lab. The authors subdivided Parkinson’s disease patients into those with and without tremor, and found that learning was affected by dopamine in opposite directions in the two groups! […]
    • Parkinson’s medication has opposite effects on two kinds of motivation
      Patients with Parkinson’s disease lack the brain chemical dopamine. Dopamine is thought to signal upcoming rewards, and this might explain why patients on treatment can develop impulse control disorders. My lab is studying two different ways to motivate people. One way is to reward or punish them based on how well they do — like performance-related pay. The other way is to promise a guaranteed reward, which also tends to keep people motivated (even though they don’t have to). […]
    • Are working memory and visual search windows into the same neural process?
      When you recall an item from memory, a prompt usually brings associated parts of that item into mind. Could this process be the same thing that occurs when you search for a visual target? We tested a neural model designed to perform working memory tasks, to see if it could also perform visual search. The model retrieves information when a partial cue re-activates a pattern of neurons by associative pattern completion. This same process could occur when we look for an item that we have in mind: […]
    • Pupil size betrays contents of working memory
      When we hold several things in short-term memory, we can shift our attention internally between different features in memory. For example we might hold two visual objects in memory, and choose to think about one of them. We show that pupils shrink when we are currently thinking of a bright object, in our recent study published in PNAS with Nahid Zokaei and Kia Nobre. […]
    • Dopamine can make our working memory more or less flexible
      Dopamine drugs are used to treat Parkinson’s disease, and alter a wide range of brain functions. One role of dopamine might be to make information we are currently holding in mind more stable — we are less likely to get distracted. We showed that this effect is crucially dependent on our initial memory capacity. People with worse memory actually showed the opposite effect of dopamine: it made them more distractible — in a new paper in J Psychopharm with Sean Fallon, Kinan […]
    • Conjunctive coding neurons in prefrontal cortexNeural model of working memory
      Is it possible to account for our patterns of short-term remembering and forgetting, and at the same time, make predictions about what the corresponding neural activity should look like? That is what we tried to do in a recent paper. Our model suggests that neurons in the prefrontal cortex are critical for storing information in working memory, but that they do not encode that information in patterns of neural activity. Instead, the same pattern might be active for many different memory […]