Curiosity, creativity, and aesthetics are typically studied separately. The extent to which they share psychological and neural mechanisms is not well understood, despite all being linked to broader personality characteristics like Openness to Experience and are driven by a desire for information and knowledge. Here, we review evidence and advance…

Recognition memory judgments can be influenced by a variety of signals including fluency. Here, we investigated whether the neural correlates of memory illusions (i.e., misattribution of fluency to prior study) can be modulated by fluency context. Using a masked priming/recognition memory paradigm, we found memory illusions for low confidence…

Reversing characters (digits and letters) when writing, and complete mirror writing, raise one of the oldest and most mysterious questions in developmental and educational psychology: Why do five-year-old children write symbols (e.g., [reversed E] for E) they have neither learnt nor seen? Attempts to draw up a complete explanatory theory of…

Lasting memories are likely to result from a lasting change in neurotransmission. In the nematode "Caenorhabditis elegans," spaced training with a tap stimulus induces habituation to the tap that lasts for greater than 24 h and is dependent on glutamate transmission, postsynaptic AMPA receptors, and CREB. Here we describe a distinct, presynaptic…

The social sciences rely on assumptions of a unified self for their explanatory logics. Recent work in the new multidisciplinary field of social neuroscience challenges precisely this unproblematic character of the subjective self as basic, well-defined entity. If disciplinary self-insulation is deemed unacceptable, the philosophical challenge…

This article is a tribute to the writings of Dr. Roland Barth through a personal story spanning over two decades. It explores Dr. Barth's personal vision of an effective school through recent brain-based principles. It revisits Barth's axioms and uses recent implications from the neurosciences as new supporting evidence for their success in…

Computational models are tools for testing mechanistic theories of learning and development. Formal models allow us to instantiate theories of cognitive development in computer simulations. Model behavior can then be compared to real performance. Connectionist models, loosely based on neural information processing, have been successful in…

Presents Daniel L. Schacter as one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions (2012). Daniel L. Schacter's major theoretical and empirical contributions include groundbreaking research on the psychological and neural foundations of implicit and explicit memory, memory distortions and…

Associative conditioning in "Drosophila melanogaster" has been well documented for several decades. However, most studies report only simple associations of conditioned stimuli (CS, e.g., odor) with unconditioned stimuli (US, e.g., electric shock) to measure learning or establish memory. Here we describe a straightforward second-order conditioning…

Long-term synaptic plasticity exhibits distinct phases. The synaptic tagging hypothesis suggests an early phase in which synapses are prepared, or "tagged," for protein capture, and a late phase in which those proteins are integrated into the synapses to achieve memory consolidation. The synapse specificity of the tags is consistent with…

Orientation and navigation in a complex environment requires path planning and recall to exert goal-driven behavior. Walking "Drosophila" flies possess a visual orientation memory for attractive targets which is localized in the central complex of the adult brain. Here we show that this type of working memory requires the cGMP-dependent protein…

Project H.M. was just the sort of thing one might expect the Internet to latch onto: it was a live streaming video of a frozen human brain being slowly sliced apart. Users who clicked the link on Twitter or Facebook between the 2nd and 4th of December 2009 were immediately confronted with a close-up shot of the brain's interior, which was…

Twenty-five years ago the author was taking a required class in neuropsychology in which students were introduced to the amazing structure and functions of the brain. During the very last class session, exams completed, students were relaxed, and by then had enough basic information to ask interesting questions. The author ventured a question…

With his knack for making science intelligible for the layman, and his ability to illuminate scientific concepts through analogy and reference to personal experience, James Zull offers the reader an engrossing and coherent introduction to what neuroscience can tell us about cognitive development through experience, and its implications for…

The authors present the context maintenance and retrieval (CMR) model of memory search, a generalized version of the temporal context model of M. W. Howard and M. J. Kahana (2002a), which proposes that memory search is driven by an internally maintained context representation composed of stimulus-related and source-related features. In the CMR…