Check out the latest edition of the CCN Newsletter for updates on newcomers, promotions, national recognition, and more!

Duke Magazine's interview of Brian Hare covers his work in the Duke Canine Cognition Lab and asks Hare about his start in animal cognition.

Whether we spent our adolescent years known as a jock, a geek, a loner or the Queen Bee, all of us were relatively aware of our status on the social scale of popularity. New research suggests that not just those at the top reap the rewards. Being overlooked by our peers can also have advantages. Plus, a look at how social status is developed in the animal world, and portrayals of popularity in literature and films. Host Frank Stasio explores popularity with Mitchell Prinstein, director of Clinical Psychology at the University of North Carolina; Michael Platt, associate professor at Duke University's Center for Neuroeconomic Studies; novelist Nina de Gramont; and Timothy Shary, director of Film and Video Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Alan Alda interviews Brian Hare on the three-part PBS Series The Human Spark as he tried to understand the differences between humans and chimps.

Young men who voted for Republican John McCain or Libertarian candidate Robert Barr in the 2008 presidential election suffered an immediate drop in testosterone when the election results were announced, according to a study by researchers at Duke University and the University of Michigan.

CHICAGO —Mounting evidence shows the benefits of exercise on both the brain and body, according to new research released today. The research focuses on the effects of physical activity on brain health and, more specifically, underscores the positive influence of regular physical activity on Parkinson’s disease, depression, premenstrual syndrome, and memory. These findings were presented at Neuroscience 2009, the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting and the world’s largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.
Exercise benefits many aspects of life. However, the National Center for Health Statistics estimates that only 31 percent of all adults, and 22 percent of adults older than 65, engaged in regular physical activity in 2006, giving these new findings particular relevance.
Today’s new research shows that:
• Thirty minutes of aerobic exercise may reduce negative moods experienced by some women just before and during their menstrual period (Matthew Davidson, PhD, abstract 785.22, see attached summary).
• Exercising daily after undergoing whole-brain radiation prevented mice from experiencing declines in spatial memory skills and increases in depression-like behavior— two symptoms that typically develop after such treatment. This finding may have implications for people with malignant brain tumors for whom radiation is often the only treatment option (Christina L. Williams, PhD, abstract 581.9, see attached summary).
• Primates that ran on a treadmill five days a week were more resilient to a neurotoxin than were their sedentary counterparts. The active primates exhibited less damage to dopamine-containing brain cells, which are important in movement (Judy L. Cameron, PhD, abstract 430.7, see attached summary).
• In a mouse model of Parkinson’s disease, exercise protected against the loss of cells that are important for maintaining function and movement, suggesting that exercise may be key in delaying disease progression (Yuen-Sum Lau, PhD, abstract 431.13, see attached summary).

Listen to Michael Platt's interview on "The State of Things" with Laura Leslie.

CCN faculty Scott Huettel and Michael Platt are interviewed in the Shanghai Daily in an article about decision making under ambiguity.

Time Magazine interviews Brian Hare on the opening of the Duke Canine Cognition Center, opening this fall!

ScientificAmerican.com podcast stemming from the article John Pearson, Michael Platt, Ben Hayden and Sri Raghavachari had published in Current Biology this week on the desire for change.

The first issue of the CCN News is available for download via the link below!

John Pearson and Michael Platt are interviewed about an article published in this week's Current Biology regarding the desire to explore new options.

Do animals experience regret -- and if so, so what sorts of things do
they most regret? Here's your chance to help start a list of Top 10
Pet Regrets, and to ask questions to some of the experts quoted in a
Findings column about animal regret.

If you own a dog, especially a dog that has anointed your favorite rug, you know that an animal is capable of apologizing. He can whimper and slouch and tuck his tail and look positively mortified — “I don’t know what possessed me.” But is he really feeling sorry?

Monkeys have the ability to perform mental addition about as well as
college students given the same test, found researchers at Duke's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. The discovery sheds light on the shared evolutionary origins of arithmetic ability, the scientists said.

Stephen Mitroff and Mathias Fleck find that "gamers" are better able to notice potential threats than people who do not play video games regularly. They are also studying the "satisfaction of search" problem, which is the human tendency to end a search after one potential problem has been identified. Answers to these questions would be directly applicable toimproving the success rate of security screeners and radiologists.

Memories can come from two areas of the brain--the medial temporal lobe, which focuses on the facts and details of a memory, and the frontal parietal network, which involves the overall familiarity of a memory. Cabeza and Kim used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study the activity of the brain while they were learning and remembering groups of associated words.

"Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience" is a textbook written for graduate and undergraduate students seeking an introduction to this emerging field. It will be published by Sinauer Associates in the fall of 2007. The text is intended to inform readers about the rapidly growing canon of cognitive neuroscience, and to make clear the many challenges that remain in this field. The editor/authors are Dale Purves, Elizabeth Brannon, Roberto Cabeza, Scott Huettel, Kevin LaBar, Michael Platt, and Marty Woldorff.

"Neuroscience, Fourth Edition" is a comprehensive textbook created for medical and premedical students as well as graduate students and advanced undergraduates who wish to learn neuroscience. The updated and revised fourth edition (the third edition was published in 2004) will be published by Sinauer Associates in the fall of 2007. The editor/authors are Dale Purves, George Augustine, David Fitzpatrick, William Hall, Anthony-Samuel LaMantia, James McNamara, and Leonard White.

Using combined information from two different brain recording methods - functional MRI and ERPs - researchers from the Woldorff Lab have discovered the timing and sequence of brain activity underlying the voluntary control of visual spatial attentional orienting.

The results indicate that specific regions of the frontal cortex activite first, followed by the parietal cortex. After initiating the shifting of the focus of visual attention in space, these frontal and parietal areas then work together to exercise control over visual corical areas sensitive to the expected location of the upcoming target. (use the link to the left to read more)

• As of July 1, 2006, Kevin LaBar was promoted to Associate Professor and was appointed as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.

• He recently became an Associate Editor for the journal Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience and a Consulting Editor for the APA journal Emotion.

• His doctoral student Daniel Dillon successfully defended his dissertation in July, 2006 and is now a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Psychology at Harvard.

After long suspecting we’re born with some math sense, researchers have shown infants indeed have some ability to count long before they can demonstrate it to Mom and Dad. It turns out they’re not unlike grown monkeys.

In the study, seven-month-old babies were presented with the voices of two or three women saying "look." The infants could choose between looking at a video image of two or women saying the word or an image of three women saying it. The babies spent significantly more time looking at the image that matched the number of women talking. (read more at the Related article).

Monkeys can match the number of voices they hear to the number of faces they expect to see, Duke University scientists have found. The finding indicates that numerical perception is truly an abstract concept and not just a function of a particular sense, said the researchers. The experimental approach also will lead to further studies exploring whether human infants, before they have a verbal capacity, understand similar abstract numerical concepts, they said.

Findings by Dr. Kevin LaBar from Duke's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and Dr. Kathleen Welsh Bohmer, a neuropsychologist from the Medical Center, could support the use of revamped tests to distinguish among types of memory loss in diseases such as Alzheimer's, encouraging therapists to use emotional props to foster learning. The American Psychological Association's Monitor on Psychology featured the work of Drs. LaBar and Welsh-Bohmer as one of the first systematic studies of fear conditioning across the adult life span. Many observers agree that the results of this experiment mark an important step forward in the field of age and cognition.

Roberto Cabeza has been selected to receive the 2005 Ewald W. Busse Research Award in the Biomedical Sciences by the International Association of Gerontology. He will receive the award at the XVIII World Congress of Gerontology in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 26-30, 2005 and present a lecture based on his award-winning research on functional neuroimaging of cognitive aging.

Using a new photo paradigm to study how the brain recalls personal memory, Roberto Cabeza, Kevin LaBar, Steven Prince, Sander Daselaar, and other Duke neuroscientists from the CCN and Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences community, have discovered significant brain function differences between laboratory memory and autobiographical memory.

A new Duke study provides clear evidence from humans that the brain's emotional center interacts with memory-related brain regions during the formation of such memories as the thrill of first love.

Until now, primatologists believed lemurs to be primitive, ancient offshoots of the primate family tree, with far less intelligence than their more sophisticated cousins, monkeys, apes and humans. But at the Duke Primate Center, with the gentle touch of his nose to a computer screen, the ringtail lemur called Aristides is teaching psychologist Elizabeth Brannon a startling scientific lesson -- that lemurs are, indeed, intelligent creatures.

From Elizabeth Marsh, who uses behavioral techniques in her research -- to David Rubin and Ian Dobbins, who use both behavioral methods and technologies such as fMRI -- to neuroscientists Roberto Cabeza and Kevin LaBar, who use fMRI a majority of their time, including staying abreast of fast-changing fMRI technology -- the Psychological & Brain Sciences department brings together "a group that can dissect behavior with a group that can dissect activity in the brain.".