Sorry, what did I say? Interruption effects on verbal fluency

If interrupted whilst speaking, we may ‘lose track’ of what we were about to say or what we have already said. In this talk I will present data from a series of exploratory experiments which provide a laboratory analogue of this phenomenon by interrupting phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tasks. We find that fewer words are produced under conditions of constant interruption, especially when the interruption is semantically similar to the primary task. Furthermore, participants make more repetitions when interrupted, suggesting that interruption may impair the episodic record of responses generated.

fMRI studies of selective attention to spatial and non-spatial stimuli

As robotic technology advances, it is becoming possible to think about using many heterogeneous robots to perform complex tasks in a range of important domains. To best leverage the capabilities of a large robot team, the robots must autonomously coordinate their activities despite limited communication bandwidth and high uncertainty. The combined sensors of the whole team will generate far more information than could possibly be communicated. Hence, a key coordination problem is to determine which information needs to be communicated to facilitate the coordination. In this talk, I will look at several algorithms for moving information around a large team, including algorithms for distributed data fusion and for maintaining joint probability distributions. I will present results in several domains, including search and rescue and defense.

A recent article by Fried and colleagues on single neuron activity in human hippocampus during free recall will be discussed, with implications for the study of memory and aging.