Cognitive Neuroscience

Portrait photo of bearded man over background with words "The Backdrop: A Podcast by UC Davis"

Podcast Features Clifford Saron on Neuroscience of Meditation

  • by Soterios Johnson
  • May 02, 2022
People have practiced various forms of meditation for thousands of years, usually in a religious context.  But only recently has meditation been the subject of scientific study. In the latest episode of The Backdrop podcast, Clifford Saron, a neuroscientist at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain who directs the Shamatha Project meditation study, discusses how mindfulness can affect our physical, mental and emotional health.
Portrait photo of UC Davis psychology major with Goldwater Scholarship logo

Student Autism Researcher Named a Goldwater Scholar

  • by Kathleen Holder
  • April 12, 2022
A UC Davis psychology major who hopes to someday work as a clinical psychologist with clients on the autism spectrum has been awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, the nation’s leading scholarship for undergraduates pursuing research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. Lynnette Hersh is one of two UC Davis students and among 417 sophomores and juniors nationwide selected from a pool of more than 5,000 applicants to receive the prestigious STEM scholarship
A man covering his ears with his hands

That Song Is Stuck in Your Head, but It’s Helping You to Remember

  • June 16, 2021
If you have watched TV since the ’90s, the sitcom theme song, “I’ll Be There For You,” has likely been stuck in your head at one point or another. New research from UC Davis suggests these experiences are more than a passing nuisance — they play an important role in helping memories form, not only for the song, but also related life events like hanging out with friends — or watching other people hang with their friends on the ’90s television show, "Friends."
A professor up close and five students standing at other end of a conference table wave at the camer

Back in Class: Capstone Seminars Offer Seniors an In-Person Finale

  • by Kathleen Holder
  • May 26, 2021
Seven capstone seminars in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science this quarter have offered seniors the option of attending in person instead of online. For most of the students — and their professors — the seminars are their first in-person courses since pandemic precautions shut down the campus more than a year ago.
Illustration of woman and her brain

Making Decisions Based on How We Feel About Memories, Not Accuracy

  • March 10, 2021

When we recall a memory, we retrieve specific details about it: where, when, with whom. But we often also experience a vivid feeling of remembering the event, sometimes almost reliving it. Memory researchers call these processes objective and subjective memory, respectively. A new study from the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis shows that objective and subjective memory can function independently, involve different parts of the brain, and that people base their decisions on subjective memory — how they feel about a memory — more than on its accuracy.

Illustration: silhouettes of a crowd of people with thought bubbles above their heads.

How Groups Make Up Their Minds

  • December 10, 2019
The choices we make in large group settings, such as in online forums and social media, might seem fairly automatic. But our decision-making process is more complicated than we know. So, researchers at the University of Washington and UC Davis have been working to understand what’s behind that seemingly intuitive process. The research has discovered that in large groups of essentially anonymous members, people make choices based on a model of the “mind of the group” and an evolving simulation of how a choice will affect that theorized mind.
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