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Eliza Bliss-Moreau
University of California, Davis www.elizablissmoreau.com What does your research focus on? The goal of my research program is to understand the biological underpinnings of affect and emotion, with a particular focus on the mechanisms that generate individual differences. My core interest is to understand why there is such marked variety in people’s affective experiences — why some people love the taste of coffee and others hate it; why some people laugh at a joke while others scowl; why the same event can result in one person developing affect-related psychopathology yet leave another person relatively unscathed. My experimental approach is both multi-method and interdisciplinary.
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Nicholas Turk-Browne
Princeton University www.princeton.edu/ntblab What does your research focus on? The research in my lab seeks to understand key components of cognition, such as perception and memory. These components are often studied in isolation, with a risk of missing the forest for the trees. The overarching theme of our work is that cognitive processes are inherently interactive — and that studying their behavioral and neural interactions can be especially informative. We investigate learning mechanisms such as “statistical learning” that transform perceptual experience into memory, and attentional mechanisms such as “background connectivity” that regulate this transformation.
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Marcela Tenorio D.
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile www.cedeti.cl What does your research focus on? My primary interests are in cognitive development across the lifespan and how to develop proper instruments to assess cognitive trajectories. My current research focuses on the development of “covert assessment” as a new method for cognitive evaluation. I am looking for a new theoretical model to justify games and technology as a better way to explore cognitive function in typical and atypical development. My hypothesis is that it is possible to assess cognitive functions without full awareness of the task.
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Virginia Sturm
University of California, San Francisco canlab.ucsf.edu What does your research focus on? My research focuses on how neural systems support emotion and how disruption in these systems relates to alterations in emotion and empathy. I use a laboratory-based approach to measure emotional physiology, behavior, and experience in patients with neurodegenerative disease. In addition, I examine the neural correlates of emotional responding by relating laboratory indices of emotion to neuroimaging measures. The primary goal of my work is to expand our understanding of the association between neural dysfunction and emotional symptoms in neurologic and psychiatric disorders.
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Decorating a Barren Memory Palace
The Huffington Post: In my mind's eye, I now have an image of overweight nudists on bicycles. It's not an image I want in my head, but it's vivid and -- my guess is -- enduring. I have science journalist Joshua Foer to thank for this. I have just watched his charming and hugely popular TEDTalk on memory, and he uses this image to illustrate an ancient mnemonic device called the "memory palace" -- a technique he has actually used to memorize the TEDTalk itself. ... And that's exactly what they found.
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Dancing Without Feet
The New Yorker: At the age of fourteen, Sidiki Conde collapsed on his way to school, in Guinea. For several months, he was in a coma. The lack of adequate medical knowledge muddies the source of his illness; it may have been polio. When he finally returned to consciousness, he was paralyzed from the neck down. He became deeply depressed; suicide crossed his mind. One night in a dream, a voice asked him, “Why you are so sad? You are still here. You have something to offer.” Inspired, Sidiki finally asked to be released from the hospital, and in the next few years gradually regained the function of his arms.
