A new study — led by Dolly Seeburger, a graduate student in the School of Psychology, alongside her advisor Eric Schumacher, a professor in the School of Psychology — investigates the brain’s mechanisms behind deep focus. The research employs fMRI to explore low-frequency fluctuations in brain networks during focused and less-focused states. The team discovered that certain brain networks synchronize and desynchronize, affecting an individual’s ability to maintain attention. This insight into the dynamic nature of brain activity could lead to better strategies for enhancing focus and attention in various cognitive tasks. (This story also appeared at Medical Xpress.)

School of Psychology Assistant Professor Hsiao-Wen Liao and colleagues (2021) decided to investigate the adaptive functions of the “reminiscence bump”. The “bump” in this term refers to the finding that the memories older adults have of their early adult years are the clearest of all of those they have in their entire lives, including the recent past. It’s possible, they argue, that there is value in massaging those events from your early adulthood as you think about your current life. Specifically, the more you feel that the events in your “bump” were ones you could control, the more likely it is that thinking about them brings you satisfaction. 

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s top biomedical research funders, will from next year require grant holders to make their research publicly available as preprints, articles that haven’t yet been accepted by a journal or gone through peer review. The foundation also said it would stop paying for article-processing charges (APCs) — fees imposed by some journal publishers to make scientific articles freely available online for all readers, a system known as open access (OA). In 2015, the Gates Foundation announced that it would require its grant recipients to make their research articles freely available at the time of publication by placing them in open repositories. It later joined cOAlition S — a group of mainly European research funders and organizations supporting OA academic publishing — and endorsed the group’s Plan S, by which funders mandate that grant holders publish their work through an OA route. Ending support for APCs is a “very sensible plan” given the unsustainable increase in such charges in recent years, says Lynn Kamerlin, a computational biophysicist and professor at the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “The Gates Foundation plan is the open-access plan I would have liked to see when Plan S was announced.”