2011 Meeting: Boston
Invited address by Carol A. Barnes, Ph.D.
In an excellent address summarizing her extensive and ground-breaking work on memory in the aging brain, Dr. Carol Barnes took care not only to emphasize the many functional changes that occur as normal brains progress towards senescence, but also the enormous number of things that are maintained, even in very old brains. Her research, which typically focuses on neurological changes in the hippocampi of rats-a region linked to spatial learning and memory-is perhaps more applicable to humans than much animal research, as spatial learning, unlike other kinds, doesn't require language... (more)
Invited address by John T. Cacioppo, Ph.D.
In his wide-ranging and engaging Friday address, Dr. John Cacioppo (University of Chicago), presented the accumulated work of decades of research on the causes and consequences of social isolation. Cacioppo, who earned his Ph.D. in 1977 from the University of Ohio, and has been conducting ground-breaking work in social neuroscience ever since, opened the talk with a description of the deadly-or at least gravely detrimental-impact of social isolation on species up and down the phylogenetic tree, including fruit flies, penguins, squirrel monkeys, and pigs, all of whom have shorter lifespans and greater morbidity when isolated from their communities... (more)
Invited address by Hugo Critchley, MBChB, DPhil, MRCPsych
Beginning with evidence he and colleagues have unearthed for direct links between activity in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) and the autonomic nervous system, Critchley went on to propose that the ACC might represent an area where information from the body is integrated with conscious awareness, suggesting that-per Shachter and Singer's formative work in psychophysiology-afferent information from the viscera and the heart are essential to sorting out how we feel in any given moment. And indeed, evidence for visceral afferent communication of peripheral information comes from-for example-experiments in which patients were given a typhoid vaccine (which causes inflammation in several key sites around the body). The 2009 study showed that the vaccine (but not a placebo injection) also induced changes in feeling states, such that patients who'd received the vaccine reported greater fatigue and confusion, as well as increased negative moods... (more)
Award presented to Eveline Crone, Ph.D.
The 21st annual Award for Distinguished Early Career Contribution to Psychophysiology was awarded to Dr. Eveline Crone, of Leiden University in the Netherlands. Crone, author of the popular Dutch book Het Puberende Brein (translated to English as The Adolescent Brain), received her Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Amsterdam, following which she completed a post-doc at U.C. Davis, under the direction of Dr. Silvia Bunge. She's been a faculty member at Leiden University since 2005, and was promoted to the rank of full professor in 2009. Her work, which she reviewed in an entertaining and animated talk, takes a developmental-cognitive-neuroscience perspective on processes related to cognitive control and self-regulation... (more)