While the concepts "economic policy", "educational policy" and "health policy" have more or less understandable referents, the concept "cultural policy" most often elicits a cognitive blank.
These authors tested the relationship of genetic variation in the KCNN3 gene; a gene that codes for the calcium-activated potassium channel SK3, previously implicated in cognitive function (Blank et al, 2003), but only inconsistently linked with schizophrenia, to a number of non-diagnostic phenotypes that reflect brain function.
In the history of philosophy, the focus of the innateness debate has been on our intellectual lives: does our inherent nature include any ideas, concepts, categories, knowledge, principles, etc, or do we start out with blank cognitive slates (tabula rasa) and get all our information and knowledge from perception.
Microglia, which are responsible for most (but not all) production of brain IL-1, have key roles in the formation and degradation of plaques in AD (Farfara et al, 2008; Lynch, 2009; Weitz and Town, 2012), and may be also involved in cognitive functioning and neurogenesis (Blank and Prinz, 2013; Ekdahl et al, 2009; Yirmiya and Goshen, 2011).
"There was kind of a cognitive dissonance," Indyk says, "about whether a blank check for Israel is necessarily the best way to secure the longevity of the Jewish state".
We then depend upon cognitive biases and heuristics to fill in the gaping blank spaces.
After decades of viewing the mind as a blank slate upon which the environment writes, cognitive neuroscientists, behavioral geneticists and evolutionary psychologists are discovering instead a richly structured human psyche.
However, cognitive pupillometry has been generally limited to experiments using auditory stimuli and a blank visual field, because the pupils' responsiveness to changes in brightness and other visual details interferes with load-induced pupil dilations.
Based on the above delineated effects of SK3 on cognition in mice (Blank et al, 2003), we hypothesized that SK3 genotypes also influence cognitive performance in humans.
