ERP Boot Camp

The ERP Boot Camp, an NIMH-funded summer workshop on the ERP
technique, will be held July 7-17 2008 at UC-Davis. Please forward
this announcement to students, postdocs, and faculty who might be
interested in attending.

The ERP Boot Camp is an 11-day introduction to the ERP technique. It
is intended for beginning and intermediate ERP researchers, or people
who are interested in getting started in ERP research. It is designed
for both basic scientists and clinical researchers.

The topics will include:

1) Where do ERPs come from? What do they mean?

2) ERP components

3) The design and interpretation of ERP experiments

4) EEG data acquisition

5) Filtering, artifact rejection, and artifact correction

6) Measuring and analyzing ERP components

7) ERP localization

8) Setting up and running an ERP lab

The Boot Camp consists of lectures on these topics, accompanied by
discussions of classic and contemporary ERP papers and guided lab
activities. It is led by Steve Luck, and the faculty includes many
distinguished ERP researchers from UC Davis and other universities.

Participants at previous Boot Camps have come from around the world
and have ranged from beginning graduate students to full professors.
They have included psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists,
neurologists, and speech pathologists. However, predoctoral students
should not apply unless they will have had at least 6 months of
intensive ERP experience before attending the Boot Camp.

We highly encourage the participation of individuals from
underrepresented groups.

Funding is available from NIMH to defray some or all of the costs of
attending the Boot Camp, but is limited to U.S. citizens and
permanent residents. International participants are encouraged to
apply, but they must obtain their own funding.

For more information about the Boot Camp and the application
procedures, see www.ERPinfo.org

Applications are due on March 31, 2008.

Graduate student reviews in Journal of Neuroscience

Journal of Neuroscience has a new section (at least, it's new to me) for graduate students and postdocs to write short reviews of recent papers. The format is described as being like a journal club, and as a venue for which junior scientists can "test their analytical and writing skills". Notably, the journal states that overly critical reviews of competitors, or glowing reviews of friend's work will not be considered (although the one I read was pretty glowing). And, they waive the submission fee for this format.

What a great idea. It's wonderful to see a high impact journal take a leadership role in training young scientists.

Prof Little Helper

Ever need a little pick me up? I certainly do, and in fact, I’m sitting here drinking a cup of coffee as I write. In the wake of the steroids scandal in baseball and the increasing prevalence of drugs in the classroom (e.g. for ADD), an important debate is brewing on the role of pharmaceuticals in our daily life. A recent short article in Nature by Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir outlines several issues related to the increasing use of stimulants to improve memory and alertness. The most striking point is that when we talk about taking a pill to achieve a cognitive benefit, it seems somehow different from drinking a cup of espresso. Interesting…

At any rate, this article is worth checking out because it calls attention to the blurry line between ‘cheating’ and taking a reasonable step to ensure maximum cognitive capacity. Clearly defining this line is critical as the next generation of school children comes of age in an era of widespread standardized testing: who can afford to fall a little behind or go at their own pace anymore?

CCNS faculty blog article on Scientific American

Scientific American runs an interesting blog called Mind Matters. It contains news and comments on neuroscience and psychology, with many entries being written by researchers in the field. The most recent entry on mirror neurons was written by CCNS director, Greg Hickok. Click here to check it out!

http://science-community.sciam.com/thread.jspa?threadID=300005636

Congratulations, Kevin!

Congratulations to Dr. Kevin Smith, PhD for successfully defending his thesis "Is there an auditory "where" stream?" Great work!

Interesting upcoming meeting on vision and memory

COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF VISUAL KNOWLEDGE: WHERE VISION MEETS MEMORY

Sponsored by the American Psychological Association, Tufts University, and the Charles River Association for Memory
Dates: Thurs, May 29 - Sat, May 31, 2008
Location: Tufts University in Medford, MA

March 31, 2008: Deadline for early registration

How can people interact appropriately with and understand the world they see around them? Research suggests that prior knowledge about the world influences visual perception at both conscious and non-conscious levels. Emerging research on the neural basis of visual knowledge has begun to synthesize ideas from vision and learning and memory fields.
A group of twelve speakers has been carefully selected from the fields of Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, Neurobiology, and Computational Modeling to discuss vision and memory, two important fields of Psychology that have proceeded largely in parallel. The goal of the conference is to enable interactions among cognitive psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and computational modelers who study the neural basis of vision and memory in humans and animals and who develop theories of visual knowledge through modeling. This conference will serve to facilitate not only the cross-pollination of ideas among scientists in each field but also to promote the emergence of a new field of visual knowledge that incorporates key ideas from these established research domains. For more information about this conference, and to register, please go to http://ase.tufts.edu/psychology/conference/

Modularity of perception

Well over 100 years ago, scientists realized that damage to specific brain regions resulted in specific behavioral deficits. For example, damage to left frontal cortex is often associated with impaired language abilities. Observations of this kind led to the hypothesis that each chunk of cortex performs a specific task (often referred to as the ‘modularity’ hypothesis). In contrast, others suggested that different regions of the cortex are not specialized at all – that all regions participate in all aspects of cognition. Time has taught us that both of these extreme views are probably incorrect. We would quickly run out of space in our head if we dedicated a chunk of cortex to each task that we needed to perform. On the other hand, given the knowledge that damage to certain brain regions leads to very specific behavioral deficits, we must acknowledge that some specialization occurs.

How do we reconcile these two points of view? Recently, we investigated the issue of modularity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (or ‘fMRI’), a method that allows us to indirectly measure neural activity in humans (see article linked below). We focused on visual information processing, since we know quite a bit about the parts of the brain that are responsible for sight. Light comes into the eye, where it is converted into a series of electrical impulses by the retina (a process called ‘transduction’). These electrical impulses are then passed from neuron to neuron until they reach a region of cortex at the very back of the head that is referred to as V1. In V1, neurons respond to simple features in the environment, such as the orientation of edges and different colors. Neurons in V1 then pass along information to other visual areas for further processing. There are actually more than 30 visual areas that are involved in the process of analyzing visual inputs, and each one seems to contribute some unique bit of information to support perception. For example, area V4 – which is a few steps up the hierarchy from V1 – registers information about simple shapes, area MT registers the direction of moving objects, and some later regions register the identity of objects (such as faces).

On the surface, this functional specialization seems to support the ‘modular’ account of brain organization; however, no single visual area can support perception without working in concert with other areas. To give an extreme example, suppose the visual system has a module that only processes information about color. Now, suppose someone suffered damage to their eyes and could no longer transduce light coming into their retina. Obviously, this person wouldn’t be able to perceive colors, even though the color module was perfectly intact. Thus, functionally specialized brain regions cannot operate in isolation; some regions convert light into neural activity, some supply information about edge orientations, some about color, some about motion, and so on. Eventually this information is combined to create a coherent perceptual representation of the surrounding environment.

Even though no single area in isolation can give rise to perception, all areas are clearly not created equal. For example, in our study we examined brain activity in area MT while people watched videos of moving objects. Obviously, the ability of MT neurons to respond to motion depends on input provided by the eyes and by earlier visual areas. However, our experiment found that decisions about the perceived direction of motion are based primarily on the activity of MT neurons, even though activity in other areas is necessary to achieve the final overall percept. According to this account, modularity arises primarily when we need to make a judgment about some attribute of our environment. If we need to know about motion, we query the activity of neurons in MT, if we need to know about color, we might query the activity of neurons in V4, and so on. This viewpoint suggests that most cognitive operations rely on neural activity in a series of distinct cortical areas; however, the ultimate output of the process may be largely mediated by a single specialized area of the brain. One important future challenge will be to determine how more complex cognitive operations (beyond judging the direction of a moving object) are carried out and represented in cortex, and if the same organizational principles apply.

Paper