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NSF Career Award
Congratulations to Emily Grossman former Blake Lab member. She has recently received a National Science Foundation Career Award which includes five years of support for work on perception of biological motion. Emmy currently is at the University of California Irvine campus. Congratulations to her for her achievement!
August 5, 2008 |
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It’s mine, I tell you
Mankind’s inner chimpanzee refuses to let go. This matters to everything from economics to law.
“I AM the most offensively possessive man on earth. I do something to things. Let me pick up an ashtray from a dime-store counter, pay for it and put it in my pocket—and it becomes a special kind of ashtray, unlike any on earth, because it’s mine.” What was true of Wynand, one of the main characters in Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead”, may be true of everyone. From basketball tickets to waterfowl-hunting rights to classic albums, once someone owns something, he places a higher value on it than he did when he acquired it—an observation first called “the endowment effect” about 28 years ago by Richard Thaler, who these days works at the University of Chicago.
Owen Jones, a professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University, and Sarah Brosnan, a primatologist at Georgia State University, suspect the answer is that, in the evolutionary past, giving things up, even when an apparently fair exchange seemed to be on offer, was just too risky.
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July 15, 2008 |
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Mind's eye' influences visual perception
Letting your imagination run away with you may actually influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery – what we see with the “mind’s eye” – directly impacts our visual perception.
“We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception,” Joel Pearson, research associate in the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology, and lead author of the study, said. “This is the first research to definitively show that imagining something changes vision both while you are imagining it and later on.”
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July 10, 2008 |
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Mark Wallace named director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute
Mark Wallace, Ph.D., associate professor of hearing and speech sciences and psychology, has been named director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute.
Wallace succeeds Elaine Sanders-Bush, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology and psychiatry and director of the Neuroscience Graduate Program at Vanderbilt Medical Center.
The Brain Institute was established in 2001 to foster and facilitate neuroscience research, training and public outreach at Vanderbilt.
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June 25, 2008 |
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Powerful magnet pulls in support for imaging study
Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have received a five-year, $5.7 million federal grant to study the human brain using one of the world's most powerful magnets.
The grant, from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, renews a $4 million Bioengineering Research Partnership grant awarded in 2002 to study “integrated functional imaging of the human brain.”
But “it's a complete change of direction,” said John Gore, Ph.D., the grant's principal investigator and director of the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science. “We want to focus on the challenges of the highest field in human imaging.”
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March 14, 2008 |
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Congratulations to Tom James the 2008 winner of the Randolph Blake Early Career Award
Tom James was a postdoctoral fellow with Isabel Gauthier from 2001-2004. He is currently on the faculty at Indiana University as an assistant professor. Tom’s research has used a combination of functional brain imaging and behavioral experiments to tackle a number of basic problems in visual cognition, such as visual priming, multimodal and semantic interactions on vision, and classical issues of viewpoint selectivity. Tom has published 22 peer-reviewed articles, most of them first-authored, in top journals such as Neuron, Psychological Science, and Neuropsychologia.
The program in Psychological Sciences established this award to recognize exemplary alumni of our program in the early stages of their career. The nominee must have been an honors student, a graduate student, or a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology or the Department of Psychology and Human Development. Nominees must be within the first five years of appointment in their first faculty position. The winner was decided by a committee of faculty from both departments.
February 15, 2008 |
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Cover Art of Journal of Neurophysiology from Schall Lab
Congratulations to the Schall lab. The cover art of the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology originated from the Schall lab.
Cover Caption: Error-related local field potentials recorded from anterior cingulate cortex of macaque monkeys performing a saccade stop signal task. Circles mark the peak negativity, and triangles mark the peak positivity following the saccade on individual trials. This signal corresponds to the error-related negativity recorded from humans. For details see Emeric EE, Brown JW, Leslie MW, Pouget P, Stuphorn V, and Schall JD. Performance Monitoring Local Field Potentials in the Medial Frontal Cortex of Primates: Anterior Cingulate Cortex. J Neurophysiol 99: 759-772, 2008. First published December 12, 2007; doi:10.1152/jn.00896.2006.
Journal of Neurophysiology Website
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February 15, 2008 |
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Slow-motion video study shows shrews are highly sophisticated predators
Shrews are tiny mammals that have been widely characterized as simple and primitive. This traditional view is challenged by a new study of the hunting methods of an aquatic member of the species, the water shrew. It reveals remarkably sophisticated methods for detecting prey that allow it to catch small fish and aquatic insects as readily in the dark as in daylight.
It is a skill set that the water shrew really needs. About half the size of a mouse, water shrews have such a high metabolism that they must eat more than their weight daily and can starve to death in half a day if they can’t find anything to eat. As a result, water shrews are formidable predators ounce for ounce.
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February 11, 2008 |
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Congratulations to Hilda Fehd on winning the Lisa M. Quesenberry Award
Graduate student Hilda Fehd in Adriane Seiffert's lab has won the Lisa M. Quesenberry Foundation Award, At The Community Foundation of Louisville. The Lisa M. Quesenberry Foundation was established by Irvin and Mary Ann Quesenberry and Kathryn Quesenberry to memorialize the accomplishments of their daughter and sister, Lisa M. Quesenberry. It is designed to provide research or study awards to motivated graduate students. Preferably, the awards will be made to female graduate students who are studying the field of psychology and who have overcome significant personal challenges to pursue their education.
February 6, 2008 |
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Vanderbilt psychologist wins prestigious National Academy of Sciences award
Vanderbilt psychologist Isabel Gauthier has been named a 2008 Troland Research Award winner by the National Academy of Sciences.
The annual Troland Research Awards include a prize of $50,000 each and are given to two researchers to recognize unusual achievement and to further their research within the broad spectrum of experimental psychology.
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January 24, 2008 |
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