Associate professor of psychology David M. Smith's research aimed at understanding how the brain stores information has implications ranging from recognizing teachers in the grocery store to neurodegenerative diseases.
“Our goal is to understand how memory works on a very basic level,” Smith said in this Cornell Research story. “We hope that knowledge will turn out to be useful later to the understanding of memory failure, as in Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. You have to understand how the brain works normally to understand how it fails.”
Smith and his colleagues use rat subjects to record neural activity as they run through mazes. The researchers change environments and study how the animals' behavior is altered, finding that the animals show context-dependent behavior. This memory learning phenomenon leads to confusion when the environments and learned behavior are in conflict with another.
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From left, MFA students Gerardo Iglesias, Sarah Iqbal and Aishvarya Arora listen to observations by two young poets at the Ithaca Children’s Garden.
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Semiconductors are at the core of the economy and national security. Their importance makes them a target. Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, discusses how Cornell is helping to keep the semiconductor supply chain safe.
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The Peace Arch, situated near the westernmost point of the Canada–United States border in the contiguous United States, between Blaine, Washington and Surrey, British Columbia.