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Developmental cognitive neuroscience has focused on age-related differences in the function of a brain region or the organization of a brain network. In contrast, evolutionary neuroscience has, until quite recently, emphasized the similarities rather than differences between species, in particular between humans and nonhuman primates.
- Start studying Adv. Cognitive Neuroscience Exam 3. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.
- Experimental psychology and 'cognitive neuroscience' (an umbrella term that includes behavioral neuroscience, social neuroscience and developmental neuroscience) are now inextricably intertwined. Nearly every major psychology department in the country has added cognitive neuroscientists to its ranks in recent years, and that trend is still growing.
Area Chair:Jun Zhang, Professor of Psychology
The Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience program represents a diverse group of faculty and students with research interests in all areas of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, including performance, sensation, perception, language, thinking, and problem solving, decision making, and judgment, categorization, learning and memory, attention, and motor control. These research efforts emphasize the creation of fundamental new basic knowledge. However, some effort is also devoted to devising innovative applications of such knowledge to important practical problems, e.g., human-computer interaction, decision aiding, and medical training. The Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience program is especially geared toward students who wish to develop skills in mathematics, statistics, neuroscience, or artificial intelligence as well as in psychology. Our program's curriculum offers several specializations that foster these technical skills for use in Formal Modeling, Mathematical Psychology, and other rigorous approaches to research on Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience.
Many faculty members in the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience program have close ties with at least one other program, particularly the Biopsychology, Social, and Developmental areas. Some also have extensive interactions with other departments in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, the Medical School (particularly in Nuclear Medicine and Radiology Department), the College of Engineering, the Business School, and the Institute of Gerontology. Because of these faculty associations, Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience students may easily elect to pursue programs of study involving close relations with other areas in the Psychology Department or other departments. For example, a student with strong interests in the cognitive neuroscience of memory may interact extensively with the PET (Position Emissions Tomograph) Center of the Nuclear Medicine Department of the Medical School or the FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) Center of Radiology Department of the Medical School; one attracted to problems in social cognition might work with members of the Social Psychology program, and an individual who wished to model problem solving behavior may study with artificial intelligence specialists in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. A recent, growing trend has been toward emphasis on neural aspects of various cognitive processes, with students studying jointly in Experimental and Clinical Neuropsychology, as well as taking advantage of Michigan's impressive neuroimaging facilities.
How does the brain represent scenes, places, objects, and events? How is this information used to guide spatial navigation and action?
In our lab, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and behavioral methods to investigate these questions.
Our lab is within the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. We are affiliated with mindCORE, the Penn Brain Sciences Center, the Center for Functional Neuroimaging (CfN), and the Computational Neuroscience Initiative (CNI).
If you are interested in participating in a research study, please visit the CCN Experimetrix or Experiments@Penn to sign up for available slots.
The Center for Cognitive Neuroscience is located on the third and fifth floors of Goddard Laboratories. For directions to our laboratory space, please visit: http://ccn.upenn.edu/home/index.shtml
Our lab will be considering new graduate students for admission in Fall 2020. Please visit the Psychology department website for more information about applying and continue to browse our website for more information about the Epstein Lab.
The deadline for applying to the graduate program is December 1st, 2019 11:59pm P.S.T.
Penn Researchers Provide New Insights Into How People Navigate Through the World
Michael Bonner (postdoctoral fellow) and Russell Epstein (principal investigator) discuss how the brain analyses a scene to find what possible paths exist in it. In two experiments (one using well controlled artificial stimuli, the other using naturalistic real-world stimuli), the researchers found that the occipital place area automatically enocdes the navigational affordances of a scene. Many organisms, including humans, can effortlessly see a scene and extract what paths exist to navigate through, yet the method in which the brain does this was poorly understood. Read how these researchers leveraged neuronal patterns from fMRI experiments to understand how the brain does this crucial computation.
Click here to read the Penn News article.
Cognitive Neuroscience Programs
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Penn Psychologists Find Photos, Videos Result in Similar Understanding of Actions
Alon Hafri (graduate student), John Trueswell (collaborator), and Russell Epstein (principal investigator) discuss how the brain represents actions in an abstract manner. Though both videos and still images were presented to subjects, a certain brain network is able to represent actions abstractly across these two different mediums. Read how these researchers used state of the art pattern similarity analyses to understand how the brain represents actions.
Click here to read the Penn News article.
Michael Bonner (postdoctoral fellow) and Josh Julian (graduate student) have organized a nanosymposium for SFN this year titled Scene Perception and Spatial Navigation. Michael and Josh will serve as the co-chairs of the session. The nanosymposium will take place from 8am to 12pm on Wednesday 11/16.
Stay tuned for more information and a list of speakers! Click here to reach the SFN website.
Mental GPS? There's an app for that! Josh Julian (graduate student) and Peter Bryan (former undergraduate research assistant) describe iJRD (a judgment of relative direction game), the app that takes research from the lab out into the real world! By playng iJRD anonymously on your iPhone, you can learn about how your navigation abilities compare to other people around the world all while aiding researchers make discoveries that will have important implications for basic research in psychology, neuroscience, urban planning, and for advancing early detection methods and targeted therapeutic approaches for diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, where spatial memory deficits occur.
Click here to read the article, and here to visit the official website of the app.
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OPA! The occipital place area: crucial for using boundaries to navigate
Josh Julian (graduate student), Jack Ryan (former lab manager), Roy Hamilton (collaborator), and Russell Epstein (principal investigator) discuss the crucial role of the occipital place area in perceiving boundaries. Indeed, boundaries are something fairly unique to scenes; faces and objects do not have the same boundaries that a city street or natural landscape contain. Read how these researchers used TMS to discover that the occipital place area is determining where boundaries are during navigation.
Click here to read the Penn News article, and here for the Science Daily coverage.
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Brain's Compass Relies on Geometric Relationships
Steven Marchette (postdoctoral fellow) and Russell Epstein (principal investigator) discuss the importance of their latest research on geometry and memory. In order to get from point A to point B, you need to know which direction you are facing; you need a mental compass of sorts. Read how our lab has shown how the brain anchors this mental compass using geometry in the retrosplenial complex.
Click here to read the Penn News article, and here for the Science Daily coverage.
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Mental ‘Map’ and ‘Compass’ Are Two Separate Systems
Josh Julian (graduate student), Alexander Keinath (graduate student), Isabel Muzzio (collaborator), and Russell Epstein (principal investigator) describe their research separating the cognitive map from the cognitive compass. Read how these researchers were able to tease the two systems apart using two different chambers with unique contextual clues. These clues allowed the mice to know which of the two chambers they were in, but they used geometry instead to orient themselves.
Click here to read the Penn News article, and here for the Science Daily coverage.
Penn study sees changing faces of beauty
Teresa Pegors (former graduate student) and Russell Epstein (principal investigator) discuss their research on the role of context and beauty judgments. Previous studies on the role of context in estimating beauty have led to contradictory responses: in some studies, the preceding attractive face causes the next face to be more attractive, but in others, the preceding attractive face causes the next to seem less attractive. Our researchers got to the bottom of this seeming contradiction. Read the article to find out the role of timing in influencing judgments of attractiveness and how no percept is seperable from recent history.
Click here to read the Penn Current article.
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Beyond the Nobel: What Scientists Are Learning About How Your Brain Navigates
Read this article describing the current state of the field in the cognitive neuroscience of navigation. Under discussion is work from our colleagues - the Mosers, John O'Keefe, and Eleanor Maguire - and from our own Russell Epstein (principal investigator). Read the article to find out more about the theorized roles of the hippocampus, parahippocampal place area, and retrosplenial cortex in storing and retrieving cognitive maps, in landmark based navigation, and in triangulating the position of different landmarks in relation to each other.
Click here to read the article from Wired.
A New Perspective on Brain Function
Sean MacEvoy (collaborator) and Russell Epstein (principal investigator) discuss evidence of a new way to consider how the brain processes and recognizes a person's surroundings. Read to find out how the brain may use objects from within scenes to identify that scene.
Click here to read the Boston College Chronicle article and here for the Science Daily article.