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How the brain thinks about crime and punishment
In a pioneering, interdisciplinary study combining law and neuroscience, researchers at Vanderbilt University peered inside people’s minds to watch how the brain thinks about crime and punishment.
When someone is accused of committing a crime, it is the responsibility of impartial third parties, generally jurors and judges, to determine if that person is guilty and, if so, how much he or she should be punished. But how does one’s brain actually make these decisions? The researchers found that two distinct areas of the brain assess guilt and decide penalty.
This work is the joint effort of Owen Jones, professor of law and of biology, and René Marois, a neuroscientist and associate professor of psychology. Together with neuroscience graduate student Joshua Buckholtz, they scanned the brains of subjects with a highly sensitive technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. Their goal was to see how the brain was activated when a person judged whether or not someone should be punished for a harmful act and how severely the individual should be punished.
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December 12, 2008 |
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Jon Kaas honored for graduate student teaching, mentoring
Jon Kaas was honored for his contributions to graduate education in the college’s faculty assembly Dec. 9 in Wilson Hall.
Kaas, Centennial Professor of Psychology, was honored with the 2008 Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring. Two of Kaas’ former post-doctoral students, Leah Krubitzer and Kenneth Catania, have gone on to win MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Awards.
“He takes an open door policy to a new level,” Hetherington said. “As one of his mentees wrote, ‘If a problem or question arises, he is permanently on-call to lend help.’”
Hetherington shared additional words from another Kaas mentee. “Jon Kaas is simply one of the very best graduate mentors that you could wish for, and his recognition in this role is overdue. He has an infectious enthusiasm for research that is encouraging and energizing to everyone in his lab.”
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December 12, 2008 |
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No Joke
This MacArthur genius is as known for his creativity and humor as his landmark research.
Ken Catania is a funny guy.
The associate professor of biological sciences is also soft-spoken, modest, articulate, creative and quick to laugh. In life, teaching and research, he always looks for the opportunity to do the fun thing—appropriate, since he’s a world-class practical joker. Some of his gems are the stuff of neuroscience legend.
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December 12, 2008 |
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Vanderbilt neuroscience research featured at annual conference in Washington, D.C.
Vanderbilt researchers from across the campus and medical center shared their new and ongoing research with colleagues from around the world in over 150 presentations and posters at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington, D.C. Nov. 15-19.
Research presented by Vanderbilt faculty, students and staff researchers spanned the neuroscience field, ranging from the role of individual neurons in responding to pain to how sensory cues may prolong addiction.
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November 29, 2008
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2008 Fine Science Tool Travel Award
Congratulations to Peiyan Wong and Lisa de la Mothe for being selected to receive the 2008 Fine Science Tool Travel Award. This award provides $500 towards the cost of attending the Society for Neuroscience meeting.
October 24, 2008 |
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Man plays banjo during brain surgery
It's not common to hear a banjo in a Vanderbilt University Medical Center operating room. But Eddie Adcock's surgery was not a common operation. Adcock, a well-known, well-traveled banjo player, recently underwent deep brain stimulation surgery, a cutting-edge procedure used to cure tremors. The surgery not only did that for Adcock, but also restored his dream of continuing to play music professionally.
The uncommon part was what the doctors asked him to do: play music while they worked on his brain.
A videotape of the Aug. 25 procedure shows Adcock lying on an operating table, picking an original song on his banjo while, on the other side of a plastic curtain, surgeons and nurses do their work.
"I'd do it again if I had to," said Adcock, 70. " … I did it for the love of playing music."
Neurosurgeon Joseph Neimat has performed at least 200 deep brain stimulation surgeries, but none as colorful as Adcock's, he said.
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October 21, 2008
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Musicians use both sides of their brains more frequently than average people
Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.
The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal Brain and Cognition.
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October 6, 2008 |
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CICN Faculty Honored at 2008 Fall Faculty Assembly
Congratulations to CICN investigators Frank Tong and Randolph Blake who both received honors at the 2008 Fall Faculty Assembly. Frank Tong received a Chancellor's Award for his ground-breaking research on neural decoding. Randolph Blake won the Jefferson Award for his distinguished and numerous contributions to the government and counsels of the University. Congrats to both for these wonderful achievements!
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August 27, 2008 |
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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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