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What does the claustrum do?

February 9, 2022 admin Leave a comment

Here with colleagues from physiology, we revclauiew the clinical effects of damage to the claustrum in Atilgan et al. (2022).…

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Hunger increases reinforcement learning rate

May 26, 2021 admin Leave a comment

Sometimes we plan ahead, thinking about future consequences of our actions. Other times, we select actions based only on their…

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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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Drugs affect subtypes of Parkinson’s disease differently

December 26, 2020 admin Leave a comment

In this commentary, 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

  • What does the claustrum do? February 9, 2022
  • Hunger increases reinforcement learning rate May 26, 2021
  • Frontal brain damage makes decisions less biased February 13, 2021
  • 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
    behrenstimbTim Behrens@behrenstimb·

    This is an absolutely delightful piece of work. You can see Ethan talk about it at 1:39 here http://youtu.be/DvsflwKOWs0.

    It is of the most engaging 10 minute talks, by one of the most joyful scientists, you will ever have the pleasure of hearing. https://twitter.com/monosovlab/status/1559229596951662592

    Reply on Twitter 1559493163164860416Retweet on Twitter 15594931631648604166Like on Twitter 155949316316486041655
    AgostonMihalikAgoston Mihalik@AgostonMihalik·

    Thrilled to share our tutorial and toolkit on Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS) with @chapmajw @dr_rick_adams @NilsRWinter @FSFerreir @johnshawetaylor @MouraoMiranda: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2022.07.012
    https://github.com/anaston/cca_pls_toolkit 1/7

    Reply on Twitter 1558026136122163200Retweet on Twitter 155802613612216320042Like on Twitter 1558026136122163200115
    reziliusRezaReza Shadmehr@reziliusReza·

    How does the brain differentiate between sensory events for which we have agency, and thus can change by altering our actions, and those that we attend to, but for which we have no means of influence?

    https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.11.499614v1

    Reply on Twitter 1547541312047546371Retweet on Twitter 154754131204754637124Like on Twitter 1547541312047546371126
    Psychonomic_SocPsychonomic Society@Psychonomic_Soc·

    Hungry? Chow down on our mouth-watering new post about hunger affecting habitual actions! Post by @brettrmyers on #psynomCABN paper by @SwietenMaaike, Rafal Bogacz, @braininthemind 🍫

    https://featuredcontent.psychonomic.org/grab-a-snickers-hunger-leads-to-reflexive-decision-making/

    Reply on Twitter 1539279619542720518Retweet on Twitter 15392796195427205185Like on Twitter 153927961954272051811
    AarothAaron Roth@Aaroth·

    Here is (what could be described as) a free lunch theorem in machine learning that I'm trying to wrap my head around. It's about sequential prediction, and the ability of an ML algorithm to convince any tester that it knows the underlying stochastic model even when it doesn't. 🧵

    Reply on Twitter 1534881633089748993Retweet on Twitter 153488163308974899316Like on Twitter 1534881633089748993101
    damnmemoryEda Mizrak@damnmemory·

    I am a bit late to announce that I will start as a Lecturer at the University of Sheffield this September and I was awarded the Marie Curie fellowship to work with Sanjay Manohar @BrainInTheMind at the University of Oxford. @MSCActions However, ...👇

    Reply on Twitter 1535216502642720769Retweet on Twitter 15352165026427207694Like on Twitter 1535216502642720769108
    hein_prizesHeinekenprizes@hein_prizes·

    #breaking Cognitive neuroscientist @KiaNobre is receiving the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science 2022 for her approach to mapping and understanding the human brain and the impact of this on many subfields in human cognitive neuroscience: https://bit.ly/3MtoSeL

    Reply on Twitter 1534467412959051777Retweet on Twitter 153446741295905177725Like on Twitter 1534467412959051777158
    richjallenRichard Allen@richjallen·

    New paper just accepted in Hippocampus:
    Intact high-resolution working memory binding in a patient with developmental amnesia and selective hippocampal damage.
    with @Amy__Atkinson, Alan Baddeley, & Faraneh Vargha-Khadem.

    Preprint upload to follow soon.

    Reply on Twitter 1532002314067779585Retweet on Twitter 15320023140677795852Like on Twitter 153200231406777958516
    BevilConwayBevil Conway@BevilConway·

    Vannuscorps, @cogneuropsylab, describe a staggering number of behavioral experiments capturing Davida’s experience. https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2021.1960495

    The case has stumped the field. @mvazirip and I sketch out some ideas in a recent commentary.

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02643294.2022.2073808#.YpYr7EPyxz4.twitter

    Reply on Twitter 1531654482374762496Retweet on Twitter 15316544823747624964Like on Twitter 153165448237476249634
    PessoaBrainLuiz Pessoa@PessoaBrain·

    H.H. Pattee is always thought-provoking: "A strategy of basic physics is to thoroughly understand simplest case before attacking hardest case. I have found that by exploring the meanings of subject and object, symbols,
    https://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/download/498/835/0

    Reply on Twitter 1530926545023508481Retweet on Twitter 15309265450235084817Like on Twitter 153092654502350848123
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    Recent work

    • What does the claustrum do?
      Here with colleagues from physiology, we revclauiew the clinical effects of damage to the claustrum in Atilgan et al. (2022). The claustrum is a thin sheet of neurons in the frontal lobe. Very few reported cases have isolated claustrum damage. In those who did, the findings don’t clearly reflect what you might expect, given the known fMRI activations and connections of the claustrum. […]
    • Hunger increases reinforcement learning rate
      Sometimes we plan ahead, thinking about future consequences of our actions. Other times, we select actions based only on their immediate reward associations. Planning ahead is crucial to staying healthy, but might be affected by motivation. We asked whether hunger affects planned vs directly reinforced action (van Swieten, Bogacz & Manohar Cogn. Aff. Beh. Neurosci. 2021). We found that people learned quicker about action values when they were hungry. Hunger didn’t affect planning. […]
    • 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 showing a part of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Healthy people are biased by previous choices, and by competing information, when making these […]
    • Drugs affect subtypes of Parkinson’s disease differently
      In this commentary, 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. […]