Donald O. Hebb Graduate Student Award

This award shall be made to the individual who, in the opinion of the committee on this award, has been judged to have presented the best paper or poster at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science. Normally, the awardee would be a Canadian citizen or would have conducted a significant proportion of his/her research, training or disciplinary work within Canada.

Honorable mention for best paper goes to Michael Jones of Queens University and to Franca Placenza of the University of Toronto.
Jones' paper was entitled "Follow the Floating Representation: Sequence Effects in an Exemplar-Production Category Learning Task". He wrote: "Current models of categorization apply the same principles to explain identification, but opposing trial-to-trial assimilation effects suggest different principles. I designed a new task to measure category representations and present data that resolve the conflict. I propose that identification is an example of classification with one exemplar per category."

Placenza's paper was entitled "The role of substance P in reinstatement of cocaine-seeking behaviour". Placenza summarized its importance in lay language as follows: "The greatest challenge associated with the treatment of drug addiction is the prevention of relapse. The present research provides a greater understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms which underlie relapse, and may ultimately aid in the development of medications for the treatment of drug addiction and the prevention of relapse."

Decisions about the 2003 award for best paper were based on additional material submitted by the graduate student (a 2-3 page synopsis of the research and a 50-word statement about the importance of the research in lay language), a supporting letter from the supervisor indicating the student's contribution to the project, audience evaluation of the papers, and the assessment of a panel of judges.

Congratulations to Jessica Phillips-Silver of McMaster University and Michael Jones of Queens University for co-winning the 2003 Donald O. Hebb award for best presentation of a poster.

Phillips-Silver's poster was entitled "Movement influences the auditory encoding of a rhythm pattern in infants and adults." She wrote: "Movement often accompanies music. When talking about rhythm in music, musicians and non-musicians alike describe the process of 'feeling' the beat. This implicates an important role of the body and movement in rhythm processing. We investigated the influence of movement in the encoding of an auditory rhythmic pattern, and found that movement experienced during training influenced the auditory encoding of the rhythmic pattern in both infants and adults."

Jones' poster was entitled "A Simple Context Co-occurrence Hyperspace Model of Semantic Memory" and he wrote about it as follows: "I describe a computational model of semantic acquisition that learns meanings from statistical redundancy in a large sample of text. Meaning is an emergent property provided language is modelled at a human scale. The work eschews innate rules, and demonstrates meaning can be learned by directly from experience with language."

Honorable mention goes to Brett Beston of McMaster University for a poster entitled "Developmental changes in glutamate receptor expression in human visual cortex." Beston wrote: "Activation of the NMDA receptor is necessary for experience-dependent developmental plasticity in the visual cortex. All previous studies of NMDA dependent plasticity in visual cortex have used animal models, leaving a gap in our knowledge about human neural plasticity. My work on NMDA expression in human V1 is filling this gap."

Decisions about the 2003 award for best poster were based on the assessment of a panel of judges, the student's lay statement, and a letter from the supervisor about the student's role in the project.

This year's prize for best paper or poster is $100, an engraved plaque, a 1-year-membership in BBCS, and a t-shirt from this year's meeting. The prize for honorable mention is a 1-year-membership in BBCS and a t-shirt.

Many thanks to the panel of judges for their careful adjudication of the awards: The chair, Dr. Daphne Maurer of McMaster University, was aided by Dr. Bruce Whittlesea of Simon Fraser University, Dr. Scott Allen of the University of Lethbridge, Dr. Laura Melnyk of the University of Western Ontario, Dr. Walter Bischof of the University of Alberta, and Drs.Terri Lewis, Sue Becker, and Melissa Rutherford of McMaster University.

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