Neal J. Cohen

Neal J. Cohen
Residence U.S.
Nationality United States
Institutions Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Alma mater University of California, San Diego
Spouse Maureen Cohen[1]:v

Neal J. Cohen is a professor of psychology in the Cognitive Neuroscience division of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[2] He is appointed as a full-time faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois.[3][4] He is the founding director of the Center for Nutrition, Learning, and Memory (CNLM), a partnership of the University of Illinois and Abbott Laboratories as of 2011. He is also the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Initiative (IHSI) at the University of Illinois, formed 2014.[5][6]

Cohen is known for his work on memory, amnesia, and learning, particularly his theories of multiple memory systems and the role of the hippocampus in relational memory. He is a co-author of Memory, Amnesia, and the Hippocampal System (1993) and From conditioning to conscious recollection: Memory systems of the brain (2001).

Education and career

Neal Jay Cohen is the son of Albert and Natalie Cohen.[1]:v He attended the University of California, San Diego, where he became interested in amnesia and how memory and learning work.[3] After working with Larry Squire,[7] Cohen received his Ph.D. in 1981. He went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), first as a postdoctoral researcher, and then as a research scientist.[3] While at MIT he worked with neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin.[8][9][10] He then joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University,[3] where he collaborated with Michael McCloskey.[11] In 1990 Cohen joined the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he became the director of the Amnesia Research Laboratory.[12]

Cohen has collaborated extensively with Howard Eichenbaum. During "the first and only time during our collaboration that we were actually able to physically work together for any extended period of time", a leave that Cohen spent at Wellesley College, they began work on the book Memory, Amnesia, and the Hippocampal System (1993).[1] They have since published another book, From conditioning to conscious recollection: Memory systems of the brain (2001).[13]

On December 19, 2011, it was announced that Neal Cohen would be the founding director of the Center for Nutrition, Learning, and Memory (CNLM), a multi-disciplinary institute for the study of nutrition, learning and memory, created through a partnership of the University of Illinois and Abbott Laboratories.[14] It was said to be the first multi-disciplinary center for nutrition and cognition research in the world.[15]

On June 30, 2014, Neal Cohen was named the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Initiative (IHSI) at the University of Illinois.[16] Cohen has been active in promoting and working to establish the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, proposed for the University of Illinois.[17][18][19] He has served on the president's advisory task force,[20] the committee to develop the new institution's core curriculum,[21] and on the search committee to recruit the inaugural dean.[22]

Research

Prior to the ground-breaking work of Brenda Milner, Suzanne Corkin and others studying the amnesiac patient Henry Molaison, researchers had assumed that memory was an emergent property of the cerebral cortex or brain as a whole. Because of H.M., they began to explore the possibility that there were multiple memory systems in the brain: different types of learning and memory that were supported by mechanisms in different areas.[23][24] In particular, the medial temporal lobe was involved in the creation of new memories and their consolidation, but not their storage.[25]

Cohen has made important contributions to this research, beginning with his Ph.D. work.[24] In 1980, at the University of California, San Diego, Neal Cohen and Larry Squire were able to show that amnesic patients were just as effective as normal subjects at the task of learning to read mirror-reversed print.[7][26] The types of skills affected by amnesia were fundamentally different: patients' ability to learn certain types of motor skills, "knowing how", was not affected, even though their ability to remember what had happened, "knowing that", was affected. This result supported the distinction between procedural and declarative knowledge and the idea that they are based on different physiological memory systems in the brain.[27] In 1981 Cohen received his Ph.D. for the thesis Neuropsychological Evidence for a Distinction Between Procedural and Declarative Knowledge in Human Memory and Amnesia.[28]

Since then, through interdisciplinary and convergent studies, Cohen has attempted to more fully understand ways in which experience is represented and stored by the brain. A major focus of his work has been the role played by the hippocampus, located in the medial temporal lobe of the brain, in forming relational memories.[29] Cohen and Howard Eichenbaum[24] have developed a theory of memory, learning and amnesia, known as relational memory theory. In this view, the hippocampus is essential in elemental cognitive processes that bind elements of experience in memory, and link memories together, forming a representation of the relations among "the constituent elements of experience"[30] referred to as a "memory space".[30] The hippocampus rapidly forms associations between incoming information about people, places, objects, and their spatial, temporal, and interactional relationships, and connects them to reactivated relational memories.[13] In the underlying representational scheme, events are represented as relations among elements of experience in a particular context. Episodes are represented as the flow of events across time. Memory is represented as a dynamic and flexible relational network of events and episodes, from which novel inferences can be drawn.[31] For example, a person's name and their face are stored as separate pieces of information in the brain, but bound together in relational memory so that the person can be recognized the next time they are seen.[32][33] The property of "representational flexibility" is considered to be critical, and as derivable from "the kind of system that must necessarily evolve to store environmental spatial information".[34]:51–54

Cohen has also examined the question of whether memory for certain types of relations is more heavily dependent on the activity of the hippocampus, and whether there are types of memories that do not depend on the hippocampus. His goal is to understand the functional architecture underlying memory: the neural substrates and subsystems of the hippocampal memory system.[13][30]

Cohen has developed new approaches and methodologies for assessing memory. Approaches include eye movement monitoring,[35] structural and functional brain imaging,[36] and computational modeling methods. Some of the techniques involved are functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), Diffuse Optical Imaging, Event Related Brain Potentials (ERPs), and Magnetoencephalography (MEG). Techniques such as eye movements make it possible to assess responses without relying on verbal reports. Computers can be used to examine where a person directs their attention, and relate patterns of attention to the person's previous exposure to a stimulus and their conscious and unconscious levels of response.[13]

Cohen works with the general population and with specific populations of patients experiencing memory impairments or brain disorders. He is involved in neuropsychological studies and in developing specific interventions. The focus of the research is basic, rather than therapeutic. However, it is hoped that understanding the types of deficits affecting a patient, in specific cases, may make it possible to identify and take advantage of their remaining strengths to improve their interactions with others.[12] Because of a lack of facilities in Champaign-Urbana, Cohen and his students travel to medical schools elsewhere to work with patients who have brain disorders such as amnesia, Alzheimer's disease, or schizophrenia. Cohen has collaborated extensively with Melissa C. Duff and others at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, Iowa City,[37] as well as with researchers at Washington University, Vanderbilt, Northwestern and Rush Medical College.[17]

Awards and honors

In 2012, Cohen was one of six Illinois professors elected to membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in recognition of his “pioneering research on memory and amnesia, distinguishing brain systems and psychological characteristics that distinguish declarative and procedural memory.”[38]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Cohen, Neal J.; Eichenbaum, Howard (1993). Memory, amnesia, and the hippocampal system. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. p. x.
  2. ↑ "Neal J. Cohen". University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "Neal Cohen". University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  4. ↑ Board of Trustees (November 13, 2014). "Board Meeting" (PDF). University of Illinois. p. 18. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  5. ↑ "Neal Cohen". Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Initiative.
  6. ↑ "COLLEGE OF MEDICINE AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN ANNUAL REPORT AY 2013-2014" (PDF). University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  7. 1 2 Cohen, N.J.; Squire, L.R. (1980). "Preserved learning and retention of pattern analyzing skill in amnesia: dissociation of knowing how and knowing that" (PDF). Science. 210: 207–209. doi:10.1126/science.7414331. Retrieved 29 April 2016.
  8. ↑ Cohen, N. J.; Corkin, S. (1981). "The amnesic patient H. M.: Learning and retention of a cognitive skill". Neuroscience Abstracts. 7: 235.
  9. ↑ Corkin, Suzanne (1995). "Lasting Consequences of Bilateral Medial Temporal Lobectomy: Clinical course and experimental findings in H.M.". In Kosslyn, Stephen M.; Andersen, Richard A. Frontiers in cognitive neuroscience. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. pp. 516–526. ISBN 9780262611107.
  10. ↑ Freed, David M.; Corkin, Suzanne; Cohen, Neal J. (January 1987). "Forgetting in H.M.: A second look". Neuropsychologia. 25 (3): 461–471. doi:10.1016/0028-3932(87)90071-6.
  11. ↑ Mccloskey, M.; Cohen, N. J. (1989). "Catastrophic Interference in Connectionist Networks: The Sequential Learning Problem". The Psychology of Learning and Motivation. 24: 104–169.
  12. 1 2 McGaughey, Steve. "Cohen's work opens up the world of memory". University of Illinois. Retrieved September 25, 2006.
  13. 1 2 3 4 Eichenbaum, Howard; Cohen, Neal J. (2001). From conditioning to conscious recollection: Memory systems of the brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  14. ↑ "Abbott and University of Illinois Establish Center for Nutrition, Learning, and Memory". Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology News. December 19, 2011. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  15. ↑ Fusaro, Dave (January 24, 2012). "Abbott and University of Illinois establish Center for Nutrition, Learning and Memory". Food Processing.
  16. ↑ "Neal Cohen Named Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Initiative Director". Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. July 2, 2014. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  17. 1 2 Wurth, Julie (February 9, 2015). "UI-Carle medical school up for Academic Senate vote". The News-Gazette. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  18. ↑ Svoboda, Abigale (February 3, 2015). "SEC discusses proposed College of Medicine, CAFT clarifications". The Daily Illini. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  19. ↑ Helenthal, Mike (February 5, 2015). "Senators asked to show support for new medical school". Illinois News Bureau. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  20. ↑ Wurth, Julie (May 6, 2015). "Ex-UI president to report on details of Carle-UI medical school". The News-Gazette. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  21. ↑ Kaler, Robin (December 10, 2015). "Core curriculum committee formed for Carle Illinois College of Medicine". Illinois News Bureau. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  22. ↑ "College of Medicine Update: Committee to identify, recruit inaugural dean for Carle Illinois College of Medicine". The Carle Foundation News Room. September 30, 2015. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  23. ↑ "The Man Who Couldn't Remember". NOVA. Retrieved 29 April 2016.
  24. 1 2 3 Eichenbaum, Howard (2012). "What H.M. Taught Us" (PDF). Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 25 (1): 14–21. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00285. Retrieved 29 April 2016.
  25. ↑ Squire, Larry R.; Wixted, John T. (21 July 2011). "The Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Memory Since H.M.". Annual Review of Neuroscience. 34 (1): 259–288. doi:10.1146/annurev-neuro-061010-113720. PMC 3192650Freely accessible. PMID 21456960.
  26. ↑ Milner, Brenda; Squire, Larry R.; Kandel, Eric R. (1998). "Cognitive Neuroscience and the Study of Memory" (PDF). Neuron. 20 (March): 445–468. Retrieved 30 April 2016.
  27. ↑ "Totally Cerebral: Think Pop Culture Gets Amnesia Right? Forgetaboutit!". Wendy Suzuki. Retrieved February 8, 2015.
  28. ↑ Cohen, Neal Jay (1981). Neuropsychological Evidence for a Distinction Between Procedural and Declarative Knowledge in Human Memory and Amnesia. San Diego: University of California, San Diego.
  29. ↑ LeDoux, Joseph (2003). Synaptic self : how our brains become who we are. New York: Penguin. pp. 114–115. ISBN 978-0142001783. Retrieved 30 April 2016.
  30. 1 2 3 Konkel, Alex; Cohen, Neal J. (15 September 2009). "Relational memory and the hippocampus: Representations and methods". Frontiers in Neuroscience. 3 (2): 166–174. doi:10.3389/neuro.01.023.2009. PMC 2751650Freely accessible. PMID 20011138.
  31. ↑ Eichenbaum, Howard; Cohen, Neal J. (August 2014). "Can We Reconcile the Declarative Memory and Spatial Navigation Views on Hippocampal Function?". Neuron. 83 (4): 764–770. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2014.07.032. Retrieved 29 April 2016.
  32. ↑ Yates, Diana (May 20, 2014). "Cognitive test can differentiate between Alzheimer's and normal aging". Illinois News Bureau. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  33. ↑ Walker, John A.; Low, Kathy A.; Cohen, Neal J.; Fabiani, Monica; Gratton, Gabriele (2014). "When memory leads the brain to take scenes at face value: face areas are reactivated at test by scenes that were paired with faces at study". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 8. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00018. Retrieved 30 April 2016.
  34. ↑ Nadel, Lynn (1994). "Multiple Memory Systems: What and Why, An Update". In Schacter, Daniel L.; Tulving, Endel. Memory systems 1994 (1. print. ed.). Cambridge, Mass. u.a.: MIT Press. pp. 39–64. ISBN 9780262193504.
  35. ↑ Ryan, Jennifer D.; Riggs, Lily; McQuiggan, Doug (15 August 2010). "Eye Movement Monitoring of Memory". Journal of Visualized Experiments (42). doi:10.3791/2108. PMC 3156021Freely accessible. PMID 20736919.
  36. ↑ Gonsalves, B. D.; Cohen, N. J. (7 December 2010). "Brain Imaging, Cognitive Processes, and Brain Networks". Perspectives on Psychological Science. 5 (6): 744–752. doi:10.1177/1745691610388776. Retrieved 30 April 2016.
  37. ↑ Duff, Melissa C.; Hengst, Julie A.; Tengshe, Chinmayi; Krema, Alison; Tranel, Daniel; Cohen, Neal J. (July 2008). "Hippocampal amnesia disrupts the flexible use of procedural discourse in social interaction". Aphasiology. 22 (7-8): 866–880. doi:10.1080/02687030701844196. PMC 2645710Freely accessible. PMID 19234620.
  38. ↑ Phillips, Philip (November 28, 2012). "Six professors at Illinois named 2012 AAAS fellows". Scientific Computing. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
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