Dear all,
as mentioned last year, I am intending to enter a Psychology team into
the inter-departmental 'Tinpot' cricket tournament this summer. This is
a 'no experienced needed' cricket league, with most departments entering
teams that have a combination of experienced and inexperienced players.
The only inclusion criteria is that you are Staff or on a postgraduate
course, i.e. PhD, MSc. There are 9 - 10 matches between May and August,
timed not to coincide with graduation and exams etc. There is a nucleus
of a team that has formed at YNiC, but we need more players.
We are having an indoor net next Thursday at 6pm, after the Thursday
evening seminar at YNiC. No ability needed, after all, I'll be playing
... Please let me know if you are interested to come along. At the
moment I've only booked one net, but we can book another if necessary.
Also, if you have any kit, including any cricket balls, they'd be
welcome (as we have to provide our own kit for indoor nets).
If you are interested and can't make it, we'll try and organise some
outdoor nets, or a friendly game, before the season starts. However,
since the students are on holiday, we thought we'd exploit the
availability of the indoor nets now.
Best wishes,
Michael
--
Dr Michael Simpson
Science Liaison Officer
York Neuroimaging Centre
Innovation Way
York
YO10 5DG
Tel: 01904 567614
Web: http://www.ynic.york.ac.uk
Hello all,
As part of the revamped Thursday afternoon sessions, at 4pm tomorrow
there will be project presentations from people planning studies at YNiC.
The following Thursday, the 15th, Andre will be demonstrating some of
the features of his new visualisation tool.
The intention of these sessions is to encourage dialog so that the whole
YNiC user community, including YNiC staff, can share the benefits of
their experiences and expertise. As such these sessions will take a
variety of forms; journal clubs, project presentations, progress
reports, seminars, training and so on. In the near future there will be
"friendly" requests for investigators involved in projects to prepare
informal progress reports, but in the mean time please do come along and
partake of some wine and snacks and see what other people are planning.
Thanks
Sam
Hi,
As some of you will know, due to an interesting issue [0] caused by GE
installing an MRI scanner update, we have been having some problems with
transferring and processing MRI data recently. Because GE (despite
having admitted that this is their fault) are unable to fix this in a
timely manner, we've now managed to work around it in house and have
processed the backlog of data.
Everything up until last week has now been processed and uploaded and
last weeks' scans will be processed by the end of today.
Apologies for the delay but this came out of nowhere and even diagnosing
the problem took quite a bit of time.
If anybody thinks that scans they have performed since the start of the
year have not been processed, can you please send an email to
mri-support(a)ynic.york.ac.uk with details and we'll look into it.
Cheers,
Mark
[0] For Those Who Care About Technical Details
The executive summary is that they've changed the two values which
represent the Minimum (0028,0108) and Maximum (0028,0109) pixel values
in the image from 16 bit signed to 16 bit unsigned. The data which is
exported is still 16 bit signed and so this change makes absolutely no
sense whatsoever. Quite a bit of DICOM code I've looked at will cope
with either US or SS for these values but expects them to be consistent
with the actual data (which makes sense, if you're expressing a minimum
or maximum, it should be done using the same data type as the data).
A full dissection of the problem follows:
Old DICOM Image (selected tags only):
(0028,0103) US 1 # 2, 1 PixelRepresentation
(0028,0106) SS 0 # 2, 1 SmallestImagePixelValue
(0028,0107) SS 275 # 2, 1 LargestImagePixelValue
New DICOM Image (selected tags only):
(0028,0103) US 1 # 2, 1 PixelRepresentation
(0028,0106) US 0 # 2, 1 SmallestImagePixelValue
(0028,0107) US 2211 # 2, 1 LargestImagePixelValue
As you can se from the second column, the two bottom tags have changed
their Value Representation from SS (Signed Short) to US (Unsigned Short).
I've included the tag (0028,0103) because it explains how the actual
pixel data is to be interpreted. MR is fixed at 16 bits which leaves
two options: signed (2's complement) and unsigned.
To quote from the DICOM Standard:
Pixel Representation (0028, 0103): Data representation of the pixel
samples. Each sample shall have the same pixel representation.
Enumerated values:
0000H = unsigned integer
0001H = 2's complement
So, the data is still written as signed, whilst the min and max values
are written as unsigned. This is, at least in spirit if not letter, a violation
of the DICOM standard.
Note that although I state that according to the DICOM spec, MR is fixed at
16 bits, the interpretation of those 16 bits isn't fixed. See the tags
BitsStored, BitsAllocated and HighBit if you're interested. (In practice,
this is usually fixed for MR at 16, 16 and 15 respectively).
The fix is to read the value out of the file and hack the relevant VRs back
to being a signed integer instead of an unsigned one. The interesting
thing is that images processed with Clariview (e.g. the YNiC Structurals
which have FL_E in them) still use the signed value. So not only are GE
wrong, they're inconsistently wrong too.
--
Mark Hymers
York Neuroimaging Centre
Dear all,
Dr Pulvermuller will be giving a talk on Thursday the 1st of March
at 4PM at YNic (tomorrow).
Here goes his abstract
Early time course of psycholinguistic information access in the brain
as revealed by neurophysiological imaging (EEG and MEG)
Friedemann Pulvermüller, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit,
Cambridge, UK, friedemann.pulvermuller(a)mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
The main stream view in neurophysiological psycholinguistics has been
that relatively late components of the brain response with latencies
of 300-500 ms reflect higher stages of language processing, such as
lexical access, semantic processing and context integration. This
view is in contrast with data from psycholinguistics indicating very
early psycholinguistic information access. Why, then, would ERP
studies reveal late neurophysiological effects, but not the early
ones psycholinguistic behavioral work would suggest? As language
stimuli are very variable physically and psycholinguistically, the
early components of the linguistic brain response, which are both
focal and short-lived, may fall victim to the neurophysiological
reflection of such stimulus variance [1]. Studies keeping stimulus
variance to a minimum [2-3] or using new paradigms and analysis
techniques [4-5] reported early (<250 ms) near-simultaneous effects
of lexical and semantic processing in word recognition. The talk will
discuss these effects, using neurophysiological data to judge
linguistic models of the time course of psycholinguistic information
access. A neurobiological model will be used to account for both the
near-simultaneity of psycholinguistic information access as well as
the minimal time delays observed. Distributed cell assemblies with
specific cortical topographies binding information about word form
and meaning may be the basis of near-synchrony and precise spatio-
temporal patterning [5-7].
[1] Pulvermüller, F. (1999). Words in the brain's language.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 253-336.
[2] Pulvermüller, F., Lutzenberger, W., et al. (1995).
Electrocortical distinction of vocabulary types.
Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 94, 357-370.
[3] Pulvermüller, F., Assadollahi, R., & Elbert, T. (2001).
Neuromagnetic evidence for early semantic access in word recognition.
European Journal of Neuroscience, 13(1), 201-205.
[4] Hauk, O., Davis, M. H., Ford, M., Pulvermüller, F., & Marslen-
Wilson, W. (2006). The time course of visual word-recognition as
revealed by linear regression analysis of ERP data. Neuroimage, in
press.
[5] Pulvermüller, F. (2005). Brain mechanisms linking language and
action. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6(7), 576-582.
[6] Pulvermüller, F. (2006). Word processing in the brain as revealed
by neurophysiological imaging using EEG and MEG. In G. Gaskell (Ed.),
Handbook of Psycholinguistics (pp. in press). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
[7] Pulvermüller, F., & Shtyrov, Y. (2006). Language outside the
focus of attention: the mismatch negativity as a tool for studying
higher cognitive processes. Progress in Neurobiology, 79, 49-71.
Silvia Gennari
Department of Psychology
University of York
Heslington, York
YO10 5DD
United Kingdom
I am looking for 6 people to volunteer for MRI, on the 6th (3 people)
and (3 people) 9th of March, between 12 and 2pm.
Please let me know if our available and if you are already registered on
the data base.
Thank you
* Participants are paid £5.
The YNiC open plan area will be closing at 5pm today as we need to
perform some IT maintenance which cannot be done with users present.
We will open again as normal tomorrow (Friday) morning.
Apologies for the short notice.
Mark
--
Mark Hymers
York Neuroimaging Centre
Dear all,
There will be a talk by Friedemann Pulvermüller (MRC-CBU) on
Thursday the 1st of March at 4PM at the YNic. Dr. Pulvermüller will
be teaching Advanced Neuroimaging to the master students (CNS)
earlier in the day and has kindly agreed to give a second talk for a
more general audience.
Dr. Pulvermüller works in cognitive neuroscience of language and has
written extensively on the topic. He has used fMRI, TMS and MEG
techniques to ask question about both time course and localization of
brain activity during language processing. He has also investigated
neuropsychological issues such as aphasia.
Here is a link to his website
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/people-pages.php?id=105
Everybody is welcome.
Silvia
Silvia Gennari
Department of Psychology
University of York
Heslington, York
YO10 5DD
United Kingdom
Apologies to anyone who this may not concern.
We have had another complaint from the receptionist of the Biocentre who
is passing on the other tenants views.
We are being asked not to use the kitchen facilities to socialise and
there should be no more than two people in there at any one time.
The other tenants are especially upset as the kettle has been broken and
that we are using their coffee amongst other things.
As you can imagine this has caused problems as the biocentre rely on
the receptionist for catering for meetings. We rely on the goodwill of
the receptionists in the Biocentre and problems of this kind could
damage the long term benefits we get from working with them.
Please can I ask users not to use the kitchen next to reception. There
is a kitchen along the corridor in the glassed roof area. DO NOT use
other people's milk/coffee/food/cutlery/bowls etc
YNiC will put a kettle in the meeting room in the MRI corridor.
While we are on the subject I would also like to add that YNIC has
visits regularly and the standards of the open plan have started to drop
dramatically again, I and other members of the team do not have time to
clean up after users on a morning.
The cleaners are not here to tidy up coffee cups etc, or rearrange
furniture. Please leave the open plan area and desks as you find them
ready for the next person.
If you have cups with liquid still in you can empty this in the sink in
MRI corridor. Please flush the fluids away after you.
Thank you
--
Gary Green
York Neuroimaging Centre
The Biocentre
York Science Park
Innovation Way
Heslington
York
YO10 5DG
http://www.ynic.york.ac.uk
tel. 01904 435349
fax 01904 435356
mobile 07986 778954
Dear all,
Sorry if you receive this message twice.
Masters students in Cognitive Neuroscience will be giving
presentations at YNic tomorrow and next Thursday at 4PM. They will
present the research they are planning to conduct during the summer.
Everyone is welcome.
The schedule is as follows
Thursday February 15th
4PM - Is it a face or a house? Using binocular rivalry to
investigate visual awareness (supervisor: Tim Andrews).
Pippa Baird
Jenny Cox
4.15PM - Do specialized visual areas
really exist in the human ventral stream? (supervisors: Tim Andrews and
Tom Hartley)
Alex Clarke
Phil Pell
4.30PM - Representing actions through language (supervisor: Gennari)
Claire Moody
(Veronica) Tzu-Hui Chuang
Thursday - February 22nd.
4PM - What is the difference between familiar and unfamiliar face
perception? (Tim Andrews)
Jodie Davies
Spyroula Spyrou
4.15PM - Hemispheres and handwriting: an MEG project (Andy Ellis)
Nuria Donamayor Alonso
4.30 PM - Localisation of auditory
function with fMRI and MEG (Quentin Summerfield)
Emma Knowles
Sam Matthias
4.45PM -Brain functional connectivity from MEG data (Gary Green)
Dave Cole
Chris Neale
John Griffiths
Lisa Brindley
Alana James
Silvia Gennari
Department of Psychology
University of York
York, YO10 5DD
United Kingdom
Hi Silvia,
Could you send an email to ynic-users(a)ynic.york.ac.uk to let them know
about the MSc sessions on the following Thursdays.
Cheers,
Tim
Silvia Gennari wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> This is just a remainder that the CNS master students' project
> presentations is starting this week at YNic on Thursday at 4PM. Here
> is a provisional list of presenters for this and next week, please let
> me know if there is any problem with the arrangements.
>
>
> Thursday February 15th
>
>
> 4PM - Is it a face or a house? Using binocular rivalry to
> investigate visual awareness (supervisor: Tim Andrews).
> Pippa Baird
> Jenny Cox
>
> 4.15PM - Do specialized visual areas really exist in the human
> ventral stream? (supervisors: Tim Andrews and Tom Hartley)
> Alex Clarke
> Phil Pell
>
>
> 4.30PM - Representing actions through language (supervisor: Gennari)
> Claire Moody
> (Veronica) Tzu-Hui Chuang
>
>
>
> Thursday - February 22nd.
>
>
>
> 4PM - What is the difference between familiar and unfamiliar face
> perception? (Tim Andrews)
> Jodie Davies
> Spyroula Spyrou
>
>
> 4.15PM - Hemispheres and handwriting: an MEG project (Andy Ellis)
> Nuria Donamayor Alonso
>
>
> 4.30 PM - Localisation of auditory function with fMRI and MEG
> (Quentin Summerfield)
> Emma Knowles
> Sam Matthias
>
>
> 4.45PM -Brain functional connectivity from MEG data (Gary Green)
> Dave Cole
> Chris Neale
> John Griffiths
> Lisa Brindley
> Alana James
>
>
> Hope to see you all there.
>
>
> Silvia
>
> Silvia Gennari
>
> Department of Psychology
>
> University of York
>
> Heslington, York
>
> YO10 5DD
>
> United Kingdom
>
>
>
>
>
--
Dr Tim Andrews
Department of Psychology
University of York
York, YO10 5DD
UK
Tel: 44-1904-434356
Fax: 44-1904-433181
http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ta505/http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/psych/www/admissions/cns/