Understanding nicotine's neurobiological and cognitive mechanisms may help explain both its addictive properties and potential therapeutic applications. As such, functional MRI was used to determine the neural substrates of nicotine's effects on a sustained attention (rapid visual information-processing) task. Performance was associated with activation in a fronto-parietal-thalamic network in b...

In cognitive robotics “ongoing development” refers to the ability to continuously build on what the system already knows, in an ongoing process, which acquires new skills and knowledge, and achieves more sophisticated levels of behaviour. Human infants are possibly the best known demonstrators of this ability; developmental psychology has many results documenting what infants can and cannot do ...

Synesthesia is a conscious experience of systematically induced sensory attributes that are not experienced by most people under comparable conditions. Recent findings from cognitive psychology, functional brain imaging and electrophysiology have shed considerable light on the nature of synesthesia and its neurocognitive underpinnings. These cognitive and physiological findings are discussed wi...

The ability to switch between multiple tasks is central to flexible behavior. Although switching between tasks is readily accomplished, a well established consequence of task switching (TS) is behavioral slowing. The source of this switch cost and the contribution of cognitive control to its resolution remain highly controversial. Here, we tested whether proactive interference arising from memo...

People acquire new knowledge in various ways and this helps them to adapt to changing environment properly. In this paper, we investigate the interoperation of multiple learning mechanisms within a single system. We extend a cognitive architecture, ICARUS, to have three different modes of learning. Through experiments in a modified Blocks World and a route generation domain, we test and demonst...

In this paper, we describe the attention mechanisms in CHREST, a computational architecture of human visual expertise. CHREST organises information acquired by direct experience from the world in the form of chunks. These chunks are searched for, and verified, by a unique set of heuristics, comprising the attention mechanism. We explain how the attention mechanism combines bottom-up and top-dow...

It is my great honor to be here for the award of the 2003 Keio Medical Science Prize. I express my gratitude to Keio University and Dr. Mitsunada Sakaguchi. Knowledge or experiences are voluntarily recalled from memory by reactivation of their neural representations in the cerebral association cortex. Four questions are central in understanding this process: (1) Where in the brain is the mnemon...

A highly adaptive aspect of human memory is the enhancement of explicit, consciously accessible memory for emotional stimuli. Recent findings from neuroimaging, neuropsychological, drug and neural stimulation studies indicate that emotional stimuli engage specific cognitive and neural mechanisms that enhance explicit memory. Emotional arousal influences memory via factors that act during memory...

SESSION OVERVIEW tt is widely accepted that price evaluations involve some form of comparisons. That is, when faced with a stimulus price, the consumer evaluates that price by comparing it with some form of comparison standard. This comparison standard is often referred to "reference price." Two basic forms of comparison standards have been proposed in the pricing literature: Internal reference...