Introducing: The Neural and Cognitive Plasticity Laboratory
The Neural and Cognitive Plasticity Laboratory is dedicated to understanding how experience guides perception and thought. Currently, we are exploring how experience with complex sounds changes the way that brains process those sounds. Have you ever wondered what is happening inside your head when you are learning to sing a song, or when you recognize a song that you have heard before? Have you considered whether similar things are happening in a whale's head when it is singing? Through experimental and computational studies, we are attempting to provide answers to these kinds of questions. Knowing how learning and other experiences affect representations of sensory events can potentially enable us to beneficially adjust how brains process these events, thereby improving both perceptual and conceptual abilities.
"...to many physiologists and psychologists the connexion between the sensation and the conception of an object usually appears to be so rigid and obligatory that they are not much disposed to admit that, to a considerable extent at least, it depends on acquired experience, that is, on psychic activity. On the contrary, they have endeavoured to find some mechanical mode of origin for this connexion through the agency of imaginary organic structures. With regard to this question, all those experiences are of much significance which show how the judgment of the senses may be modified by experience and by training derived under various circumstances, and may be adapted to the new conditions..." - H. von Helmholtz, 1866
Director: Eduardo Mercado III
Behavioral Neuroscience & Cognitive Psychology
Park Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260-4110
