2017 Archive
Monkey sees. . . monkey knows?
September 6, 2017
When asked a question, a human being can decline to answer if he knows that he does not know the answer. Although non-human animals cannot verbally declare any sort of metacognitive judgments, Jessica Cantlon, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Rochester, and PhD candidate Stephen Ferrigno, have found that non-human primates exhibit a metacognitive process similar to humans.
Continue ReadingPatient Plays Saxophone While Surgeons Remove Brain Tumor
August 25, 2017
Music is not only a major part of Dan Fabbio’s life, as a music teacher it is his livelihood. So when doctors discovered a tumor located in the part of his brain responsible for music function, he began a long journey that involved a team of physicians, scientists, and a music professor and culminated with him awake and playing a saxophone as surgeons operated on his brain. Fabbio’s case is the subject of a study published today in the journal Current Biology that sheds new light on how music is processed in the brain.
Continue ReadingMichael Tanenhaus awarded top cognitive science prize
August 1, 2017
Michael Tanenhaus, the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, is this year’s recipient of the prestigious David E. Rumelhart Prize, the premier award in the field of cognitive science. He accepted the award at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society last week.
Continue ReadingSurviving a Stroke Propels Career in Brain Research
July 26, 2017
On a warm day in July 2005, Frank Garcea’s soccer playing days came to an abrupt end when he suffered what could have been a deadly stroke during a practice with his teammates. Instead, the events of that day and his subsequent treatment – which serve as the basis for a review published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) – set him on a career path that would ultimately lead to a Ph.D. studying how the brain recovers from injury.
Continue ReadingNow More Than Ever, Employees Want To Know: Is There A Second Marshmallow?
June 7, 2017
From Forbes.com: Few psychological studies are as famous as the Stanford marshmallow experiment. In a series of observations begun in the late 1960s and early 1970s, psychologist and Stanford professor Walter Mischel offered children a single marshmallow on the spot or two marshmallows if they waited 15 minutes without eating the one in front of them.
Continue ReadingPiantadosi named ‘rising star’ by Association for Psychological Science
March 16, 2017
The Association for Psychological Science (previously the American Psychological Society) recently named Steven Piantadosi, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, to its list of distinguished Rising Stars for his contributions to the field of psychology. Piantadosi’s research focuses on how people learn language and concepts.
Continue ReadingWhat humans and primates both know when it comes to numbers
January 16, 2017
For the past several years, Jessica Cantlon has been working to understand how humans develop the concept of numbers, from simple counting to complex mathematical reasoning. Early in her career at the University of Rochester, the assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences began studying primates in her search for the origins of numeric understanding.
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