People choosing between two or more equally positive outcomes experience paradoxical feelings of pleasure and anxiety, feelings associated with activity in different regions of the brain, according to research led by Amitai Shenhav, an associate research scholar at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University. Full Story.
On June 2nd the Neuroscience Institute celebrated the accomplishments of the graduating seniors in the Neuroscience Certificate Program. This year we had 43 students from various majors receive the certificate.
Ilana Witten, an assistant professor of Neuroscience and Psychology, was awarded a 2014 McKnight Scholars Award for her proposal entitled "Deconstructing Working Memory: Dopamine Neurons and Their Target Circuits".
Making decisions involves a gradual accumulation of facts that support one choice or another. A person choosing a college might weigh factors such as course selection, institutional reputation and the quality of future job prospects. Full Story.
A STUDY published last week found that the brains of autistic children show abnormalities that are likely to have arisen before birth, which is consistent with a large body of previous evidence. Yet most media coverage focuses on vaccines, which do not cause autism and are given after birth. How can we help people separate real risks from false rumors? Full Story.
You wouldn't hear the mating song of the male fruit fly as you reached for the infested bananas in your kitchen. Yet, the neural activity behind the insect's amorous call could help scientists understand how you made the quick decision to pull your hand back from the tiny swarm.
Cristina Domnisoru, a neuroscience graduate student in David Tank's laboratory and recipient of Princeton's prestigious Jacobus Fellowship, will be honored at an Awards Ceremony during Princeton University's Alumni Day 2014. The Porter Ogden Jacobus fellowship is the highest academic honor bestowed upon a graduate student, awarded annually to only four graduate students displaying the highest scholarly excellence in their graduate work.
No matter how different they seem — the learned and contemplative neuroscientist versus the toy orangutan with a penchant for off-color jokes — almost any adult who experiences them knows that Princeton University professor Michael Graziano is the voice behind his simian puppet Kevin. Full Story
Four Princeton University professors have received the 2013 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their research careers. Full Story.
In 1971, the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research was established at Brandeis University as an expression of the conviction that educational institutions have an important role to play in the encouragement and development of basic science as it applies to medicine.
View the 2013 Rosenstiel Award Winners.
William Bialek, the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics and the Lewis Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, has received the Society for Neuroscience's Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience. Full Story.
The pain and itching associated with shingles and herpes may be due to the virus causing a “short circuit” in the nerve cells that reach the skin, Princeton researchers have found.
Ann Duan is a third-year student conducting research in Carlos Brody's laboratory, investigating the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive control and rule-switching. Yao Lu is a second-year student conducting research in David Tank's laboratory, using multimodal (olfactory and visual) stimuli to investigate how neural activity sequences are affected by learning and task manipulations.
Dr. Michael Yartsev, who completed his Ph.D. in Nachum Ulanovsky's lab at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and joined the Princeton Neuroscience Institute as a Starr Fellow in Carlos Brody's lab in December 2012, has been awarded two prestigious prizes: SFN's 2013 2013 Donald B.