Carnegie Mellon Brain Research Shows Visual Perception System Unconsciously Affects Our Preferences
Researchers Launch NSF-supported Startup, neonlabs, To Apply Findings to Online Video Market

"New research from Carnegie Mellon University's Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) shows that the brain's visual perception system automatically and unconsciously guides decision-making through valence perception." Lead author of the study, TDLC's Sophie Lebrecht, who works in TDLC investigator Michael Tarr's lab (part of the Perceptual Expertise Network), explains that the findings offer important insights into consumer behavior in ways that traditional consumer marketing focus groups cannot address. More

Note: The initial seed money for this work was provided by a 2010 TDLC small grant to TDLC member Sophie Lebrecht, who is part of Michael Tarr's lab (TDLC Investigator and CNBC co-director).

Cortical Rhythms in the Human Brain During Free Exploration are Linked to Spatial Memory

TDLC researcher Joe Snider, trainee Markus Plank and PI Howard Poizner, along with colleagues Gary Lynch and Eric Halgren, are participating in exciting work in the Motion Capture Lab at UC San Diego. By combining motion capture, virtual reality and high density electroencephalographic recordings (EEG), their goal is to identify neural processes, based on EEG temporal dynamics, that underlie active spatial exploration and memory.

In a study funded by a grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), subjects actively explore an environment on a virtual aircraft carrier deck presented with a lightweight head-mounted display (HMD) having a total of 12 miniature monitors. The researchers are finding that cortical rhythms in the human brain recorded as subjects freely walk about a large-scale virtual environment predict future memory for the environment. To view an example of this virtual reality, please click here: http://vimeo.com/28649538.

Different kinds of visual learning reflect different patterns of change in the brain
Yetta Wong, Jonathan Folstein and Isabel Gauthier

In two recent articles, Yetta Wong, Jonathan Folstein and Isabel Gauthier, members of the Temporal Dynamics Learning Center supported by NSF, compared two different kinds of learning traditionally called “perceptual expertise” and “perceptual learning”. The scientists bridged across very different training methods, to learn about how the kind of experience we have with an object category determines what we learn about them and which brain networks are responsible for the learning. 

Let's Face It partners with The Andy Warhol Museum

The Let's Face It program, under TDLC's Jim Tanaka, is partnering with The Warhol Museum to help kids with autism develop face-reading skills. Jim Tanaka explains how he made the initial "connection" in his mind and decided to contact the museum: "It's the artists (at The Warhol) who know the most about faces and what goes into a face," says Tanaka. "I was inspired by Andy Warhol's approach that the observer becomes part of the art. I want our game user, a child, to become part of the game in order to make the game more meaningful, and to help make that leap from the computer screen into the real world."

In addition to the above-mentioned partnership, Jim Tanaka recently returned from the Warhol panel discussion on Art and Health
Behavior -- an exchange that focuses on how artists, educators
and scientists can collaborate to improve health outcomes. He is hoping to open up further activities that combine the Let's Face It! Program with The Warhol.

TDLC's Paula Tallal is interviewed on BAM! Inside The Minds of Teens with Dr. Regina Lamourell:
Is Your Child Struggling with Literacy?

This article discusses how the problem of literacy is something "beyond a lack of finances or a lack of will ... It is a lack of understanding of fundamentally what it takes from the perspective of how the brain works, to become a good reader." Improvement requires a new understanding of interventions and approaches of getting these interventions to children who need them. The interview also focuses on the language and reading weaknesses of incarcerated youth.
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