astronomy

Russell Poldrack

Russell Poldrack is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Russell Poldrack rather than just read about it. In short: Russell "Russ" Alan Poldrack (born 1967) is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. He is a professor of psychology at Stanford University, associate director of Stanford Data Science, member of the Stanford Neuroscience Institute and director of the Stanford Center for Reproducible Neuroscience and the SDS Center for Open and Reproducible Science.

Key takeaways

Russell Poldrack belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Russell Poldrack to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Russell Poldrack from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Russell "Russ" Alan Poldrack (born 1967) is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. He is a professor of psychology at Stanford University, associate director of Stanford Data Science, member of the Stanford Neuroscience Institute and director of the Stanford Center for Reproducible Neuroscience and the SDS Center for Open and Reproducible Science.

Education and academic career Poldrack received his bachelor's degree in psychology from Baylor University in 1989, and his PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995, working with Neal J. Cohen. From 1995 to 1999, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, working with John Gabrieli. Prior to his appointment at Stanford in 2014, he held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School, UCLA, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Scientific career

Learning and memory Poldrack's earliest work studied the brain systems involved in nondeclarative memory. His dissertation work examined the relation between stimulus-specific learning and general skill in a motor skill learning task. His first neuroimaging paper demonstrated changes in brain activity associated with learning of mirror-reading skill, showing that it was associated with a shift from activity in parietal regions toward activation in inferior temporal regions. He later showed that learning of classification learning was associated with a tradeoff between activity in the basal ganglia and medial temporal lobe, and proposed that this reflected a competition between declarative and nondeclarative memory systems in learning. In 2006, his group published work showing that this tradeoff between systems is modulated by dual-task interference

Executive function Poldrack's group has also studied the brain systems involved in the inhibition of motor responses. With Adam Aron, Poldrack published two papers that established the role of a circuit involving right prefrontal cortex and the subthalamic nucleus in the inhibition of motor responses. They subsequently showed that it was possible to predict individual differences in inhibitory behavior from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data using high-dimensional regression machines.

Decision making In 2007, Poldrack and colleagues demonstrated that brain activity during decisions under risk exhibited the pattern of gain- and loss-responsiveness predicted by prospect theory. In subsequent work, they found that risky decisions in the Balloon Analog Risk Task could be predicted from fMRI data, and that these decisions were related to a balance of activity between large-scale brain systems involved in value processing and cognitive control respectively.

Reverse inference In 2006, Poldrack published a paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences that criticized the field for the use of “reverse inference”, in which the presence of activation in a brain region is used to infer the engagement of a specific psychological process. Using a Bayesian analysis, he showed that this form of inference generally provides weak evidence in favor of specific psychological processes. His lab subsequently applied machine learning methods to fMRI data, demonstrating that it is possible to accurately infer mental states in a way that generalizes across individuals. Poldrack has also been engaged in criticizing the unwarranted use of reverse inference in the media. In 2007 he was part of a group of researchers who published a letter in the New York Times that criticized the use of reverse inference in regard to the US presidential election. In 2010 he led a group of 45 researchers who published a letter in the New York Times criticizing the use of reverse inference in an Op-Editorial on neuromarketing.

Neuroinformatics and data sharing Poldrack's group has developed a formal ontology for cognitive neuroscience, known as the Cognitive Atlas. In 2009, Poldrack established the OpenfMRI project(later rebranded as OpenNeuro) which openly shares complete raw fMRI datasets. He has collaborated with Tal Yarkoni on the development of Neurosynth, an online meta-analytic tool for the neuroimaging literature. In 2014 he established the Stanford Center for Reproducible Neuroscience, which develops tools for reproducible data analysis including fMRIPREP and MRIQC.

MyConnectome Project In 2012, Poldrack undertook a project to collect brain imaging, behavior, and biological data on himself for an extended period of time. Called the MyConnectome Project, this study lasted 18 months, during which Poldrack was scanned with magnetic resonance imaging more than 100 times. Analyses of these data showed that brain connectivity changed over this long period of time within specific brain networks, and also showed that the nature of variability over time within an individual is qualitatively different from variability across individuals. This entire dataset was made openly available to the public for further analysis

Science of Behavior Change Poldrack is a part of the Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) network. His research uses brain imaging to understand the brain systems supporting decision making, executive control, and behavior change. Poldrack's lab also develops informatics tools to help make sense of the growing body of neuroimaging data (including the OpenNeuro and NeuroVault data sharing projects and the Cognitive Atlas ontology) as well as tools to help improve the reproducibility of neuroimaging research (including the Brain Imaging Data Structure and BIDS-Apps projects).

Professional Achievements In 2009, Poldrack was elected as Chairperson of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. He is a founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of Frontiers in Brain Imaging Methods, and has served as a member of editorial boards for Psychological Bulletin, Nature Scientific Data, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Cerebral Cortex, Human Brain Mapping, GigaScience, SCAN (Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience), Cognitive Science, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, and Neuroimage. He was the chair of the External Advisory Panel of the Human Connectome Project, and member of advisory panels for the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study and the Kavli Human Study

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Russell Poldrack

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Russell Poldrack claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Russell Poldrack before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Russell Poldrack ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Russell Poldrack

In research: Russell Poldrack appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Russell Poldrack in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Russell Poldrack is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1967 births, 20th-century American psychologists, 21st-century American psychologists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Russell Poldrack outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Russell Poldrack in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Russell Poldrack means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Russell Poldrack out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Russell Poldrack in simple terms?

Why does Russell Poldrack matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Russell Poldrack?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Russell Poldrack.