“Tomographic brain imaging has a rich iconography. Whilst figures are prepared for scientific communication (i.e., directed to other researchers) they also often end-up on magazine and journal covers (i.e., directed to a lay audience). Scientific figures should however not be just glossy illustrations of what is in the text.”

Recently gave invited seminars on brain morphology and innovative cognitive psychology methods at King’s College London, Toronto Western Hospital’s Krembil Institute, and InteraXon Inc.

(Photo taken at King’s College London.)

“Although item-memory for emotional information is enhanced, memory for associations between items is often impaired for negative, emotionally arousing compared to neutral information. We tested two possible mechanisms underlying this impairment, using picture pairs: 1) higher confidence in one’s own ability to memorise negative information may cause participants to under-study negative pairs; 2) better interactive imagery for neutral pairs could facilitate associative memory for neutral pairs more than for negative pairs.”

“A common finding is that items associated with higher reward value are subsequently remembered better than items associated with lower value. A confounding factor is that when a higher value stimuli is presented, this typically signals to participants that it is now a particularly important time to engage in the task. […] Results converged on null effects of value on subsequent free recall accuracy. Re-analyses attributed Madan et al.’s value-bias to competition between choice items that were paired during learning. Value may not bias memory if it does not signal task importance or induce inter-item competition.”

It was great to speak on the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Trainee Professional Development Panel last week!

Here’s a link to the write-up about the event: A Note to Worried Graduate Students: There’s Still Hope.

In this special issue, we seek submissions on the influence of social, motivational, and emotional processes on learning and memory. Submissions are invited that address any subtype of learning and memory. Multi-method (e.g., integrating behavioral, patient, computational, electrophysiological, or neural measures) and developmental approaches are of particular interest.

“No formal investigations have been conducted into the efficacy or potential influence of reviewer recommendations on editorial decisions, and the impact of this on the expectations and behaviour of authors, reviewers and journal editors. This article addresses key questions about this critical aspect of the peer review submission process. We suggest several future steps which could be taken towards improving the review process and make it more transparent, better understood, and fairer for all parties.”

New paper looking at fMRI activity in hippocampal subfields and long-axis subregions, published in NeuroImage. Work with Stan Hrybouski, Nikolai Malykhin, and other collaborators.

Also see “Amygdala subnuclei response and connectivity during emotional processing” (2016, NeuroImage) for similar methods.

Monday, March 25th, 5:45 - 7:15 pm, Hyatt Regency San Francisco Hotel

“Panelists this year are Dr. Laura Libby (Data Scientist at Uber), Dr. Maureen Ritchey (Boston College), Dr. Christopher Madan (University of Nottingham), Dr. Erika Nyhus (Bowdoin College), and Dr. David Ziegler (UCSF).”

Welcome to the new lab website! I hope you find the updates useful–and feel free to contact me to join or collaborate.

First lab paper!! Great work by John Ksander and Sarah Kark.

Summarizes results of 15 experiments across 8 publications, with a total of over 1300 participants.

This paper is an overview of years of decision making studies done in collaboration with Marcia Spetch (University of Alberta) and Elliot Ludvig (University of Warwick).