How are parenting practices associated with bullying in adolescents? - CAMHS around the Campfire recording

For this session we welcomed Dr. Ana Pascual-Sanchez, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Brain Sciences, Imperial College London, to discuss her CAMH paper 'How are parenting practices associated with bullying in adolescents? A cross-sectional study'.

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 7

This is the seventh volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility (OSAR), and the fifth drawn from papers presented at the New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR, November 14–16, 2019). The OSAR series is devoted to publishing cutting edge, interdisciplinary work on the wide array of topics falling under the general rubric of ‘agency and responsibility.’ In this volume, roughly half of the chapters focus on agency, and half focus on responsibility. In the former camp, there are essays about the non-observational knowledge we have about our current intentional actions, constitutivism, answerability, organizational agency, socially embedded agency, and a brain sciences critique of causal theories of action. In the latter camp, there are essays about praise, guilt, blame, sanction, forgiveness, and disclaimers.

Cộng tính văn hóa và đặc tính WEIRD

Trong một bài bình luận trên Tạp chí Nature vào năm 2010 có tiêu đề “Most people are not WEIRD” [1], phát triển từ một bài nghiên cứu trên Tạp chí Behavioral and Brain Sciences [2], Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine và Ara Norenzayan đã đặt ra cụm từ WEIRD, viết tắt cho “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic”...

The ‘naturalistic’ fallacy: Leveraging the power of media to drive cognition

So-called “naturalistic” stimuli have risen in popularity in cognitive, social, and affective psychology and neuroscience over the last 15 years. However, a critical property of these stimuli is frequently overlooked: Media—like film, television, books, and podcasts—are fundamentally not natural. They are deliberately crafted products meant to elicit particular human thought, emotion, and behavior. Given the rich history of scholarship on media as an art and science, subsuming media stimuli under the term “naturalistic” in psychological and brain sciences is inaccurate and obfuscates the advantages that media stimuli offer because they are artificial. Here, we argue for a more informed approach to adopting media stimuli in naturalistic paradigms. We empirically review how researchers currently describe and justify their choice of stimuli for a given experiment and present strategies to improve rigor in the stimulus selection process. We assert that experiencing media should be considered a task akin to any other experimental task(s), and explain how this shift in perspective will compel more nuanced and generalizable research using these stimuli. Throughout, we offer theoretical and practical knowledge from multidisciplinary media research to raise the standard for the treatment of media stimuli in psychological and neuroscientific research.

How a Brain Makes a Mind

A historical overview is given of interdisciplinary work in physics and psychology by some of the greatest nineteenth-century scientists, and why the fields split, leading to a century of ferment before the current scientific revolution in mind-brain sciences began to understand how we autonomously adapt to a changing world. New nonlinear, nonlocal, and nonstationary intuitions and laws are needed to understand how brains make minds. Work of Helmholtz on vision illustrates why he left psychology. His concept of unconscious inference presaged modern ideas about learning, expectation, and matching that this book scientifically explains. The fact that brains are designed to control behavioral success has profound implications for the methods and models that can unify mind and brain. Backward learning in time, and serial learning, illustrate why neural networks are a natural language for explaining brain dynamics, including the correct functional stimuli and laws for short-term memory (STM), medium-term memory (MTM), and long-term memory (LTM) traces. In particular, brains process spatial patterns of STM and LTM, not just individual traces. A thought experiment leads to universal laws for how neurons, and more generally all cellular tissues, process distributed STM patterns in cooperative-competitive networks without experiencing contamination by noise or pattern saturation. The chapter illustrates how thinking this way leads to unified and principled explanations of huge databases. A brief history of the advantages and disadvantages of the binary, linear, and continuous-nonlinear sources of neural models is described, and how models like Deep Learning and the author’s contributions fit into it.

Toward a productive evolutionary understanding of music

We discuss approaches to the study of the evolution of music (sect. R1); challenges to each of the two theories of the origins of music presented in the companion Target Articles (sect. R2); future directions for testing them (sect. R3); and priorities for better understanding the nature of music (sect. R4). [in press, Behavioral and Brain Sciences]

Learning Rates Are Not All the Same: The Interpretation of Computational Model Parameters Depends on the Context

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has revolutionized the cognitive and brain sciences, explaining behavior from simple conditioning to problem solving, across the life span, and anchored in brain function. However, discrepancies in results are increasingly apparent between studies, particularly in the developmental literature. To better understand these, we investigated to which extent parameters generalize between tasks and models, and capture specific and uniquely interpretable (neuro)cognitive processes. 291 participants aged 8-30 years completed three learning tasks in a single session, and were fitted using state-of-the-art RL models. RL decision noise/exploration parameters generalized well between tasks, decreasing between ages 8-17. Learning rates for negative feedback did not generalize, and learning rates for positive feedback showed intermediate generalizability, dependent on task similarity. These findings can explain discrepancies in the existing literature. Future research therefore needs to carefully consider task characteristics when relating findings across studies, and develop strategies to computationally model how context impacts behavior.

‘The Centre for Attention Learning and Memory (CALM)’ – In conversation Dr. Joni Holmes

In this podcast we speak to the head of The Centre for Attention Learning and Memory (CALM) Dr. Joni Holmes, at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, at the University of Cambridge.

The Implementation of Preconditioned Epidermal Neural Crest Stem Cells to Combat Ischemic Stroke. Comment on Othman, F.A.; Tan, S.C. Preconditioning Strategies to Enhance Neural Stem Cell-Based Therapy for Ischemic Stroke. Brain Sci. 2020, 10, 893.

In the recent review published in Brain Sciences, Othman and Tan suggested several preconditioning strategies to improve stem cell therapy after ischemic brain injury [...]

What's All This Furor About an Enchanted Loom?

This article explores the gowing interconnections between the brain sciences and the social sciences, It porvides a brief historical summary of the development of brain science, reviews advances in what is currently known about the brain, and dfdescribes where the field stands today. Importantly for those interested in the social sciences, the article also discusses the potential impact of the brain sciences on work in the discipline, indicates why we should care about developments in the brain science field, and provides some practical tools that have come out of the resrarxh, The article concludes with a summary of what the developments might mean for a social sciences practitioner.