[BIC-announce] McConnell Centre - Special Lectures: Aug 12 and 13

[Sylvain Baillet, Dr]

Dear All:

This is an announcement for a couple of Special Lectures hosted by the MNI's McConnell Brain Imaging Centre (BIC):

Both lectures are at 2pm, deGranpré Communication Centre, MNI, 3801 University St.

Monday, August 12:

"Second-person Approaches in Social Neuroscience: Neuroimaging Methods for the Study of Social Interaction."

Guillaume Dumas, PhD
Human Brain & Behavior Laboratory
Center for Complex Systems & Brain Sciences
Florida Atlantic University, Boca-Raton (USA)

Dr Dumas will also host a discussion on the open-science HackYourPhD project at 6pm that dat, HEC Montreal: http://www.eventbrite.ca/event/7770398471

Abstract - How are neural, behavioral and social scales coordinated in real time so as to make possible the emergence of social cognition? Answering this question requires to study the dynamics of coordination in real human interactions. However, even at the simplest dyadic scale, methodological and theoretical challenges remain. Several theories have been proposed to infer the link between neurobiology and social psychology, but the dynamical components of human interaction are still poorly explored because of the difficulty to record simultaneously the brain activity from several subjects. This is the goal of hyperscanning methodology. I will first present how the combination of situated social paradigms with hyperscanning allowed to demonstrate that states of interactional synchrony at the behavioral level correlate with the emergence of inter-individual synchronization at the brain level (Dumas et al. PLoS ONE 2010). It thus demonstrated for the first time anatomo-functional similarities between two human brains at the millisecond level, without any common external driving signal. The related inter-brain synchronization in different frequency bands appeared to reflect different aspects of social interaction, such as interactional synchrony, anticipation of other's actions and co-regulation of turn-taking. Then, I will present how such phenomena can be simulated with biologically inspired numerical simulations (e.g. using direct measures of brain connectivity with DTI) and how the human connectome facilitates inter-individual synchronizations and thus may partly account for our propensity to generate dynamical couplings with others (Dumas et al. PLoS ONE 2012). Finally, I will present another tool called Virtual Partner Interaction (VPI) (Kelso, et al. PLoS ONE 2009). This VPI integrates equations of human motion at the neurobehavioral level. A human and a "virtual partner" are then reciprocally coupled in real-time, which allow controlling the dynamical parameters of the interaction while maintaining the continuous flow of interaction. This technique scaled up to the level of human behavior the idea of dynamic clamps used to study the dynamics of interactions between neurons. By combining studies on both human-human and human-machine interactions thus present new approaches for investigating the neurobiological mechanisms of interpersonal coordination, and test theoretical/computational models concerning the dynamics at the neural, behavioral and social scales.


Short bio: Guillaume Dumas has trained at École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures of Paris (France), and graduated in Theoretical Physics at the University of Paris: Orsay. He then obtained a Master degree in Cognitive Science at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), and completed his Ph.D. training in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Paris: Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, in 2011. In 2012, he moved as postdoc in the Human Brain & Behavior Laboratory of the Center for Complex Systems & Brain Sciences, at Florida Atlantic University. His interdisciplinary research is focused on integrative accounts of neural, behavioral and social coordination dynamics. Methods used range from both intra- and inter-individual neuroimaging techniques to neurocomputational simulations. He is also a scientific writer and journalist and is engaged with multiple projects at the cross-road of Art and Science. Recently, he co-created the community HackYourPhD which gather students, researchers and citizens around the topic of open science.


Tuesday Aug 13:

"Neuronal Processing Associated with Auditory Perceptual Awareness"

Andrew R. Dykstra, PhD
Auditory Cognition Lab
Neurologie und Poliklinik
Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg (Germany)

Abstract - How a sensory stimulus transcends subconscious processing and enters awareness is a fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience.  To date, the vast majority of knowledge concerning this topic stems from studies conducted in the visual modality.  However, a truly general theory of conscious access should also apply to other types of sensory stimuli, making the auditory system an ideal test bed with which to examine theories of conscious access stemming from vision.  In this talk, I will present results from several multimodal neuroimaging (M/EEG, sMRI, iEEG) experiments designed to address the following questions.  (i) Can the neural correlates of auditory perceptual awareness be dissociated from those of auditory selective attention? And (ii): What are neural correlates of auditory perceptual awareness in brain areas outside the classically-defined auditory cortex and in neuronal frequency regions (e.g. gamma, high gamma) less observable with non-invasive methods?

Short bio - Andrew Dykstra was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area before completing an undergraduate degree in Electrical and Audio Engineering at the University of Miami. During his first year of course work in his graduate program in the Speech and Hearing Program at Harvard/MIT, he learned that one could probe the brain directly (in contrast to the engineer's black-box approach) via the various neuroimaging methodologies as well as functional neuroanatomical lesion studies. Consequently, Andrew did his masters thesis with Jennifer Melcher, examining the effects of cardiac-triggered image acquisition on state-of-the-art auditory fMRI. For his PhD, which was supervised by Syd Cash and Eric Halgren, Andrew made ECoG recordings from neurosurgical patients while they participated in two now-classical auditory psychoacoustic paradigms (streaming and informational masking). After defending his thesis in 2011, Andrew moved to his current location in Heidelberg, Germany to work with Alexander Gutschalk in order to further his methodological training (now in M/EEG and fMRI) as well as continue his study of the neural basis of conscious auditory perception.

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Sylvain Baillet, PhD

MNI Killam and FRSQ Senior Scholar
Interim Director, McConnell Brain Imaging Centre
Director, MEG Research
Associate Professor, Neurology & Neurosurgery
Associate Member, Dept. of Biomedical Engineering

neuroSPEED lab<http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ResearchLabsNeuroSPEED/>
MEG @ McGill<http://www.facebook.com/MEGatMcGill>
Brainstorm project<http://neuroimage.usc.edu/brainstorm>

McConnell Brain Imaging Centre
Montreal Neurological Institute
McGill University

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