Rik Henson | |
---|---|
Born | 1970 (age 52–53) |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh |
Known for | Human memory, neuroimaging |
Awards |
|
Scientific career | |
Institutions | MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge (2004 onwards) Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London (1997-2004) |
Thesis | Short-term memory for serial order (1997) |
Website | mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/rik.henson/personal |
Richard "Rik" Henson, FBA (born 1970) is a British cognitive neuroscientist and academic. He is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, where he works at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England. He studies the neural bases of human memory. [1] From 2021 to 2023, he is also President of the British Neuroscience Association. [2]
In 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. [3]
His most famous articles are:
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology, overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology, and computational modeling.
Cognitive neuropsychology is a branch of cognitive psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes. Cognitive psychology is the science that looks at how mental processes are responsible for the cognitive abilities to store and produce new memories, produce language, recognize people and objects, as well as our ability to reason and problem solve. Cognitive neuropsychology places a particular emphasis on studying the cognitive effects of brain injury or neurological illness with a view to inferring models of normal cognitive functioning. Evidence is based on case studies of individual brain damaged patients who show deficits in brain areas and from patients who exhibit double dissociations. Double dissociations involve two patients and two tasks. One patient is impaired at one task but normal on the other, while the other patient is normal on the first task and impaired on the other. For example, patient A would be poor at reading printed words while still being normal at understanding spoken words, while the patient B would be normal at understanding written words and be poor at understanding spoken words. Scientists can interpret this information to explain how there is a single cognitive module for word comprehension. From studies like these, researchers infer that different areas of the brain are highly specialised. Cognitive neuropsychology can be distinguished from cognitive neuroscience, which is also interested in brain-damaged patients, but is particularly focused on uncovering the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processes.
Timothy Shallice is a professor of neuropsychology and the founding director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, part of University College London. He has been a professor at Cognitive Neuroscience Sector of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy since 1994.
Daniel Lawrence Schacter is an American psychologist. He is a William R. Kenan, Jr. endowed professor of psychology at Harvard University. His research has focused on psychological and biological aspects of human memory and amnesia, with a particular emphasis on the distinction between conscious and nonconscious forms of memory and, more recently, on brain mechanisms of memory and brain distortion, and memory and future simulation.
Christopher Donald Frith, is a British psychologist and professor emeritus at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. Visiting Professor at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Michael I. Posner is an American psychologist who is a researcher in the field of attention, and the editor of numerous cognitive and neuroscience compilations. He is emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, and an adjunct professor at the Weill Medical College in New York. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Posner as the 56th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Developmental cognitive neuroscience is an interdisciplinary scientific field devoted to understanding psychological processes and their neurological bases in the developing organism. It examines how the mind changes as children grow up, interrelations between that and how the brain is changing, and environmental and biological influences on the developing mind and brain.
Stanislas Dehaene is a French author and cognitive neuroscientist whose research centers on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness. As of 2017, he is a professor at the Collège de France and, since 1989, the director of INSERM Unit 562, "Cognitive Neuroimaging".
Repetition priming refers to improvements in a behavioural response when stimuli are repeatedly presented. The improvements can be measured in terms of accuracy or reaction time and can occur when the repeated stimuli are either identical or similar to previous stimuli. These improvements have been shown to be cumulative, so as the number of repetitions increases the responses get continually faster up to a maximum of around seven repetitions. These improvements are also found when the repeated items are changed slightly in terms of orientation, size and position. The size of the effect is also modulated by the length of time the item is presented for and the length time between the first and subsequent presentations of the repeated items.
Jonathon Stevens "Jon Driver" was a psychologist and neuroscientist. He was a leading figure in the study of perception, selective attention and multisensory integration in the normal and damaged human brain.
Anna Christina Nobre FBA, MAE, fNASc is a Brazilian and British cognitive neuroscientist working at the University of Oxford in England.
Howard C. Nusbaum is professor at the University of Chicago, United States in the Department of Psychology and its College, and a steering committee member of the Neuroscience Institute. Nusbaum is an internationally recognized expert in cognitive psychology, speech science, and in the new field of social neuroscience. Nusbaum investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms that mediate spoken language use, as well as language learning and the role of attention in speech perception. In addition, he investigates how we understand the meaning of music, and how cognitive and social-emotional processes interact in decision-making.
, Professor emeritus
Kenneth R. Pugh is president, director of research, and a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut and professor in the Department of Psychology at University of Connecticut. He is also an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at Yale University, an associate professor in the Department of Diagnostic Radiology at the Yale School of Medicine, and director of the Yale Reading Center. Pugh is a cognitive neuroscientist and experimental psychologist who is best known for his work on the neural, behavioral and cognitive underpinnings of reading and other cognitive activities.
Eleanor Anne Maguire is an Irish neuroscientist. Since 2007, she has been Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London where she is also a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow.
Francesca Gabrielle Elizabeth Happé is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. Her research concerns autism spectrum conditions, specifically the understanding social cognitive processes in these conditions.
Karalyn Eve Patterson, is a British psychologist in Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge and MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. She is a specialist in cognitive neuropsychologyand an Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge.
The UCL Division of Psychology and Language Sciences is a Division within the Faculty of Brain Sciences of University College London (UCL) and is located in London, United Kingdom. The Division offers teaching and training and undertakes research in psychology and communication and allied clinical and basic science. It is the largest university psychology department in England.
Russell "Russ" Alan Poldrack is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. He is a professor of psychology at Stanford University, associate director of Stanford Data Science, member of the Stanford Neuroscience Institute and director of the Stanford Center for Reproducible Neuroscience and the SDS Center for Open and Reproducible Science.
Hugo Critchley is a British professor of psychiatry at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, a partnership of the University of Brighton and the University of Sussex.