Consciousness
You can recognize a strawberry’s color and say “red.” How does that processing relate to the way red appears to you?
Cognitive science
Within Cognitive science · Search all subjects
Dreaming
A sleeping mind can build vivid worlds. Do those experiences perform a function, reflect other useful processes, or do both?
Functions of sleep
Sleep is essential, but why do its benefits require a state in which an animal becomes less responsive to its surroundings?
Memory engrams
Experiences leave lasting changes in the brain. How do those changes form a memory that can be preserved, revised, and retrieved later?
Neural coding
Neural activity carries information, but which aspects of that activity does the brain actually use? A pattern readable by an analyst need not be the pattern used for behavior.
Perceptual binding
Vision assigns colors, shapes, and movements to objects. How do distributed neural representations support those assignments without mixing features from different objects?
Language acquisition
Children build language abilities from experience while their brains are developing. How do learning, prior capacities, and interaction produce that transformation?
Human general intelligence
Performance across different cognitive tasks is often related. Which brain mechanisms help explain that shared variation and the many abilities that do not reduce to it?
Value-based decision making
A choice combines what we want, what we expect, and what we remember. How does the brain turn those inputs into one action, especially when the options are uncertain?
Cognitive control
We can switch tasks, follow a rule, and suppress a tempting response. How do brain networks coordinate that flexible control?
Alzheimer’s disease
Amyloid, tau, immune activity, and other changes accompany Alzheimer’s disease. How do they interact to cause neuronal dysfunction, and why does the course differ between people?
Parkinson’s disease
Parkinson’s disease affects multiple cells and systems, yet people develop it through different combinations of risks. What drives the damaging processes and their spread?
Sound–touch synesthesia
For some people, sounds consistently evoke localized touch sensations. What creates that unusually strong link between hearing and touch?
Developmental stuttering
Stuttering often begins while speech is developing, and many children later recover. What explains its onset and different developmental paths?
Visual crowding
A visible object can become hard to recognize when surrounded by other objects. Why does the arrangement of the whole scene change that interference?
Amodal completion
We perceive whole objects even when part is hidden. How does the brain combine visible geometry with knowledge of what the object might be?
Color constancy
An object can look similarly colored under different lighting. How do visual circuits separate surface color from illumination?
Binocular rivalry
When the eyes receive incompatible images, perception can alternate between them. How do eye and pattern competition produce those switches?
Working memory maintenance
We can hold information briefly after it disappears. Which neural processes keep it available for the next action?
Biological credit assignment
A behavioral outcome depends on many neurons. How does learning change the particular cells and connections responsible for it?
Interval timing
Brains judge durations and time actions over fractions of a second to seconds. How are those intervals represented and flexibly adjusted?
Attentional blink
A second target can be missed when it follows another by a few hundred milliseconds. How do processing and response competition create that brief limit?
Auditory scene analysis
We can follow one voice among many. How does attention organize overlapping sounds into sources we can track?
Odor-mixture perception
A blend can smell like its ingredients or like a new odor. What determines which percept emerges?