W ork force studies often reflect common prejudices , cost-saving philosophies, rumor and innuendo , but little data. An exception to this rule exists in the recently published Committee on Manpower of Pulmonary and Critical Care Societies (COMPACCs) study. 1 As I read it, there is a shortage of pulmonary and critical care specialists now and this shortage will get worse in the future. These co...

In this issue of Neuron, Nandy et al. (2017) reveal a number of important new insights into the neural mechanisms that are responsible for attentional selection.

Traditional theories of attention rely on the idea that when we search for a target in a visual display the brain boosts the activity of neurons optimally tuned for the target features. In this issue of Neuron, Navalpakkam and Itti take a computational approach to show that this strategy is actually very inefficient when the target is surrounded by distractors with similar features. Instead, th...

Currently available empirical evidence is often insufficient to distinguish among developmental theories of word learning, categorization, and induction. This paper argues that theories of conceptual development should be evaluated not only on the basis of their ability to account for empirical findings, but also on the basis of their consistency with a broader body of knowledge, particularly w...

It is well recognized that individuals who are dependent on addictive drugs exert a bias in selective attention toward drug-related stimuli, which can influence their craving for the drug and their drug-taking behavior. Over the past decade, this phenomenon of attentional bias has grabbed the attention of many researchers in the field of addiction. The observation that disruptions in cognitive ...