What's Popular at #CNS2017?

Memory wins again!

Word cloud for 835 poster titles at CNS 2017.

The 2017 Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual meeting will start tomorrow, March 25. To no one's surprise, memory is the most popular topic in the bottom-up abstract submission sweepstakes.

In contrast, the top-down selections of the Cognosenti are light on memory, with a greater emphasis on attention, speech, mind-wandering, and reward.

Word cloud for 16 titles/abstracts in four Invited Symposia.

The member-generated Symposium Sessions are once again memory-centric, but with the key additions of speech, learning, information, and oscillations.

Word cloud for 43 titles/abstracts in nine Uninvited Symposia.

The hot area of the brain this year is OFC, the orbitofrontal cortex.

Kicking off the meeting is a new addition to the program, a symposium on Big Ideas in Cognitive Neuroscience, which will focus on language, motor control/action, and (you guessed it) memory:

Six speakers, in three pairs, will consider some major challenges and cutting-edge advances, from molecular mechanisms to decoding approaches to network computations. The presentations and debate aim to provide a tentative outline of what might be a productive and ambitious agenda for our fields.

Speakers:

• Charles R. Gallistel (Rutgers University) and Tomás Ryan (Trinity College Dublin & MIT) on memory.
• Angela Friederici (Max-Planck-Institute) and Jean-Rémi King (NYU) on language.
• John Krakauer (Johns Hopkins University) and Danielle Bassett (University of Pennsylvania) on action/motor.