Dear Users

This Thursday (4.15-5.15 pm in YNiC) there will be two presentations. Please see below for details of each talk. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Best wishes Rebecca

1) Gareth Gaskell, Department of Psychology

MSc project update

"Phonotactic learning in your sleep"

Abstract: Speakers of all languages show evidence of phonotactic constraints in the types of speech errors they produce. Recent research by Dell and colleagues has shown that these constraints can be modified by recent experience. However, the time course of this learning remains unclear. In the current study, run as an MSc project, participants had to repeat syllable sequences in which dependencies between particular consonants and vowels were embedded. They had 1 training block, followed by two testing blocks about 2 hours later. Participants who stayed awake between training and testing showed no evidence that these constraints had been learned, whereas participants who had a nap showed evidence of new constraints in their errors. I will discuss these results in the light of memory models that promote generalisation of knowledge during sleep.

2) James Davey

Project proposal presentation

"fMRI & TMS investigations of semantic cognition"

Abstract: Semantic cognition can be broken down into three independent components; amodal knowledge, modality-specific features, and control processes. Patient studies have implicated the anterior temporal lobes (ATL) bilaterally in amodal knowledge (Jefferies et al. 2006), semantic control involves fronto/temporoparietal regions (Jefferies et al. 2006), and modality specific features are distributed throughout sensory-motor cortex. Neuroimaging has demonstrated that transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the ATL disrupts semantic processing regardless of modality (Pobric, Jefferies, & Lambon Ralph, 2010). In contrast, stimulation to left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) disrupted controlled retrieval and selection of semantic knowledge. pMTG has also been implicated in tool use(Noppeney, 2008), so it is unclear whether this is a control or representational site. The current study will simultaneously manipulate control and representation demands. Participants will complete a picture matching task for animals and tools; control will be manipulated through the influence of cues and miscues, whilst representational demands are varied through manipulations of specificity. The first study will use fMRI to investigate the brain response to the experimental tasks, and the functional data will be used to guide placement for the TMS coil in the second study. This will use the same task/stimuli, in an offline TMS paradigm to examine changes in performance resulting from stimulation to the three sites. Finally we will use a joint fMRI/TMS paradigm, comparing baseline fMRI activity to the BOLD response after offline TMS to investigate the neural consequences of TMS stimulation on the network supporting semantic cognition.