Savings in motor adaptation
Relearning a movement adjustment can be faster than learning it first. Which memories and processes produce that advantage?
Cognitive science
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Sense of agency
We feel that our actions cause events. How do prediction and observed regularities combine to produce that feeling?
Body ownership
Vision and touch can make a rubber hand feel like your own. Which circuit processes produce this bodily attribution?
Awake hippocampal replay
While an animal pauses, its brain can rapidly replay activity associated with routes. What does that replay causally accomplish?
Compositional cognitive maps
A familiar room or obstacle can be reused in a new layout. How does the brain combine known parts into a useful map?
Event segmentation
Continuous activity feels divided into events. How do prediction and knowledge determine where one event ends and another begins?
Metacognition
Choosing an answer and judging whether it is right are different tasks. Which brain computations produce that second judgment?
Aphantasia
Some people cannot voluntarily picture a scene. Which neural differences explain lifelong absence of visual imagery?
Spontaneous thought
Thoughts arise and change direction without a new instruction. Which processes initiate and switch these self-generated episodes?
Theory of mind
Children learn to reason about what others know and want. How does this grow into understanding minds that influence one another?
Developmental dyslexia
Reading difficulty can involve language, sound–symbol learning, and reading circuits. How these factors interact over development remains unsettled.
Developmental dyscalculia
Persistent arithmetic difficulty can involve numbers, memory, strategy execution and strategy selection. Their developmental causal relationship remains incomplete.
Statistical learning
People pick up patterns through exposure. Which learning processes are shared across tasks and senses, and which are specialized, remains unsettled.
Infantile amnesia
Infants can form memories, yet adults recall few early-life episodes. How development changes memory persistence and later access remains unresolved.
Predictive language processing
Readers and listeners anticipate language. How several predictive mechanisms combine across linguistic structure and different people remains unsettled.
Ticklishness
Tickling can produce involuntary laughter and mixed feelings. How human touch processing, context and laughter circuits combine remains incomplete.
Transitive inference
Learning that A outranks B and B outranks C can let us compare A with C. How do people build and revise this knowledge?
Bilingual language control
Bilingual speakers can select and switch languages. How do control strategies adapt to conversation, competing demands and language experience?
Completed-intention aftereffects
A reminder can bring back an action that is already finished. What determines whether that memory merely interrupts us or prompts a mistaken repeat?
Motion-induced blindness
A dot can disappear from view while it remains on the screen. A moving pattern around it changes whether it reaches awareness.
Déjà vu
A new situation can feel familiar while you know that it is new. How does that clash arise?
Hypnotic suggestion
A suggestion can change how an arm feels, how an action seems to happen, or what someone perceives. The mechanisms differ across people and suggestions.
Placebo analgesia
Expectations and learned treatment associations can reduce pain. Which mechanisms determine the effect and how long it lasts?
Salmon olfactory imprinting
A salmon learns stream odors as a juvenile and uses them years later when returning to spawn. How does that memory survive the replacement of sensory cells?