University of Groningen
Neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying adaptation
van den Berg, Berry
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Publication date: 2018
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van den Berg, B. (2018). Neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying adaptation: Brain mechanisms that change the priority of future information based on their behavioral relevance. University of Groningen.
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Neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying adaptation:
Brain mechanisms that change the priority of future
information based on their behavioral relevance
Propositions1. The conceptual difference between attention and behavioral relevance is irrelevant for the brain (this thesis).
2. Whether adaptation has a lasting impact on neural activity depends on the stability of the environment (this thesis).
3. Alpha inversely enables focus (this thesis).
4. Brain regions fulfill multiple roles and can underly many different cognitive (sub) processes. One challenge of studying brain functioning is disentangling which cognitive processes are conceptually useful and which ones can be better thought of as a combination of other processes (this thesis – and social neuroscience). 5. Understanding how the relationship between behavior and neural activity
changes over time and the lifespan is key to understanding brain functioning and adaptation (this thesis).
6. Currently, the questions that we can ask about the brain are severely limited by our methods. It is crucial that we develop new methodology to measure human neural activity.
7. The author and his brain have a complicated (inverse) affair with alpha (this thesis). 8. Caffeine amplifies the utilization of reward-prospect and kicks up the adaptation to
events an extra notch (a replication of Chapter 3 with caffeine)
9. The most fun part of science is making new connections, sometimes increasing complexity. Paradoxically, for the brain, the goal of adaptation is to reduce complexity and better predict which sources of information should receive higher priority.
10. The collective long term memory of the scientific community is rather short (predictive encoding and schematic anticipation).
