Funded by a three-year $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Distinguished Professor George R. Mangun, director of the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, is launching a project to better understand the cognitive mechanisms behind realistic voluntary attention, or attention directed by an individual’s free will. The project will be conducted in collaboration with engineering colleagues at the
University of Florida.
Both humans and other animals are good at learning by inference, using information we do have to figure out things we cannot observe directly. New research from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, shows how our brains achieve this by constructing cognitive maps.
Tamara Swaab, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Psychology and at the Center for Mind and Brain, was recently named a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science for her contributions to the understanding of human language and cognition.
How do we make decisions about a situation we have not encountered before? New work from the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain shows that we can solve abstract problems in the same way that we can find a novel route between two known locations — by using an internal cognitive map. The work was published Aug. 31 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Much of what scientists know about human learning, visual attention and memory comes from laboratory studies involving artificial tasks, like watching and recalling words or colored shapes flashed on a computer monitor. Two UC Davis research teams, with support from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, will study the development of learning in a wide range of ages — from infancy to young adulthood — in more naturalistic settings.
