By Carl Zimmer, Discover magazine The past and future may seem like different worlds, yet the two are intimately intertwined in our minds. In recent studies on mental time travel, neuroscientists found that we use many of the same regions of the brain to remember the past as we do to envision our future...

by Katherine Harmon, Scientific American Gray Matter Shows Introspective Ability Is Not Black and White When answering a question, your accuracy in assessing whether you have gotten the answer right—or wrong—might depend on the volume of gray matter in a certain part of your brain, according to a new...

By Josh Tapper, Guelph Mercury News August 10, 2010 Although adults older than 65 face challenges to body and brain, the 70s and 80s also bring an abundance of social and emotional knowledge, qualities scientists are beginning to define as wisdom. As Carstensen and another social psychologist, Fredda...

By Ricardo DeAratanha from The Los Angeles Times "Why does our capacity to pick up skills like playing instruments or learning languages, to remember where we put our keys and a thousand other things, get poorer and poorer as we age? A study just published in the Journal of Neurscience suggests...

By Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich , npr.org "If you've ever kept a journal, you've probably worried about someone coming across it and getting an uninvited peek into your personal life. But the daily traces we leave behind in our writings – more and more in today's world of emails,...

By Greg Miller "Most people have so-called flashbulb memories of where they were and what they were doing when something momentous happened: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, say, or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. (Unfortunately, staggeringly terrible news seems to...

From TED "Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics...

by Ed Yong and Alice Fishburn from Seed Magazine "Imagine if you could rewrite your mind as quickly as a document on your computer. No more painful memories, no phobias or ingrained fears, just a blank slate where the scars that mark each human life used to be. This may sound like the stuff of Hollywood...

by Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld from Scientific American "In 1984 Kirk Bloodsworth was convicted of the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl and sentenced to the gas chamber—an outcome that rested largely on the testimony of five eyewitnesses. After Bloodsworth served nine years in prison...

By Rebecca Saxe | TED.com "Sensing the motives and feelings of others is a natural talent for humans. But how do we do it? Here, Rebecca Saxe shares fascinating lab work that uncovers how the brain thinks about other peoples' thoughts -- and judges their actions." Watch the video . Image...

By Philip J. Barnard The dominant conceptualization of working memory distinguishes mechanisms that handle auditory‐verbal and visuospatial representations from central executive resources that control and guide them. A straightforward case can be made that executive mechanisms evolved initially in the...

By Stanley H. Ambrose The evolution of modern human behavior was undoubtedly accompanied by neurological changes that enhanced capacities for innovation in technology, language, and social organization associated with working memory. Constructive memory integrates components of working memory in the...

Pascal Boyer A large amount of research in cognitive psychology is focused on memory distortions, understood as deviations from various (largely implicit) standards. Many alleged distortions actually suggest a highly functional system that balances the cost of acquiring new information with the benefit...

Abstract: When people selectively forget feedback that threatens the self ( mnemic neglect ), are those memories permanently lost or potentially recoverable? In two experiments, participants processed feedback pertaining either to themselves or to another person. Feedback consisted of a mixture of positive...

The mnemic neglect effect is the phenomenon of disproportionately poor recall for threatening (rather than non-threatening) feedback that refers to the self (rather than another person). Does trait modifiability moderate mnemic neglect? We hypothesized that mnemic neglect will be present for feedback...

According to the mnemic neglect model, people are threatened by feedback that has unfavorable implications for their central self-aspects, and, as a result, they recall it poorly. What is the locus of such poor recall (i.e., mnemic neglect)? Experiment 1 examined the role of information inconsistency...

In order to investigate the impact of limited memory on human behavior, I develop a model of memory grounded in psychological and biological research. I assume that people take their memories as accurate and use them to make inferences. The resulting model predicts both over- and underreaction but provides...