Colleague and collaborator Olivia Carter, with philosopher Jakob Hohwy, spoke recently to David Lipson on ABC’s Lateline about brains and consciousness.
Olivia Carter on Consciousness
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Seeing blue and feeling blue
Publishing a paper to critique a retracted paper might seem a strange thing to do. But that’s what we did. In a blog post featured on F1000Research, we explain why.
Feeling blue: addressing challenges in color perception research
Attention in time
We have a paper in the latest issue of Psychological Science, which we’ve called Reconsidering temporal attention in the attentional blink. Those with access can read the published version at the journal website, and anyone can download our preprint from the Open Science Framework (OSF). All of the data and materials are also available at the OSF site.
Earlier on, Alex also wrote a great blog post as an introduction to the paper.
Special thanks to Ed Vul for inspiring the analysis and providing his original data.
Goodbourn, P.T., Martini, P., Barnett-Cowan, M., Harris, I.M., Livesey, E.J., & Holcombe, A.O. (2016). Reconsidering temporal selection in the attentional blink. Psychological Science, 27(8), 1146–56. doi: 10.1177/0956797616654131
Science vs Science
Here’s Alex (and others) on the ABC podcast Science vs talking to Wendy Zukerman about reproducibility in science.
Some people have called our current situation a reproducibility crisis. It’s hard to know how to define, exactly, the word crisis. But what we do know is that, of the efforts to try to systematically reproduce findings, whether they be in cancer biology, whether they be in psychology, the success rate has not been impressive.
More on this subject from me, soon.
Our work featured by the Psychonomic Society
Our paper, Sleep after practice reduces the attentional blink, has been featured on the Psychonomic Society website. In the paper, published in the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, we report that performance on a temporal attention task improves after a short daytime nap. The improvement seems to be linked to the amount of time spent in non-REM Stage 2 sleep, characterised by abrupt brain waves called sleep spindles. Stephan Lewandowsky wrote this blog post about it.
The results of Cellini and colleagues add the novel finding that sleep—and in particular N2 spindles—also benefits attentional selection in time: Participants in their experiment who exhibited a greater number of spindles during their nap showed a greater improvement in T2 detection performance after their nap.
Need to invent a light bulb? Take a nap to boost your attentional skills.
Mixture modelling to measure temporal attention
Alex wrote a neat blog post to explain a method we’ve been using to model attention. We’re still working on applying it in a whole range of scenarios, but so far we’ve used it in papers about sleep and the attentional blink, and simultaneous attentional selection.
ARVO 2014 Poster
For the past few days, I’ve been at the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. Tomorrow is the final day, and I’m presenting my poster in the session just before the closing keynote. It’s titled Cortical patterning genes are associated with individual differences in visual orientation perception [ PDF of session abstracts ]. I’ll be in Exhibit Hall SA from 10:45–11:45 am for the all posters session, then again from 12:00–1:45 pm.
Talk at UC Riverside
Next week, I’m leaving to spend a few weeks in the U.S. My first stop is the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside—we collaborate with Sara Mednick‘s team of sleep researchers there. I’m going to give a brown bag lunch talk on Wednesday, April 30th at 12:10pm in the Goldman Library.
Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference 2013
I’m at the annual meeting of the Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society at Monash University in Melbourne. Tomorrow, I’m presenting a poster based on our work investigating the genetic basis of a visual phenotype related to autism and schizophrenia.
You can download the poster here.
Poster Session 1: Friday 29th November 2013 at 15:00–16:30
Location: Building K, Monash University, Caulfield Campus
Poster 015: Genetic associates of a visual endophenotype of autism and schizophrenia
Variants in the 1q21 risk region are associated with a visual endophenotype of autism and schizophrenia
I’ve recently published a paper with my Cambridge collaborators in the journal Genes, Brain and Behavior. There is a lot of research currently looking into the genetics of psychological disorders. But we now know that most result from a very complex interplay of multiple genetic and environmental factors, which makes traditional genetic approaches less useful than we might hope. One promising approach is to investigate the genetics of psychological endophenotypes—these are traits linked to a disorder, but which are likely to have a relatively simple relationship with genetic mechanisms. Basic visual functions seem to be ideal candidates for this sort of study, because in many cases we know a lot about the underlying physiology.
