Dear Users

This week (4.30-5.30 pm at YNiC), there will be two presenters giving talks for the YNiC seminar:

1) Nora Vyas, King's College London

Title TBC

http://kcl.academia.edu/NoraVyas

2) Tom Hartley, Department of Psychology

YNiC project proposal

"Efficient Localisation of the Human Grid System".

Summary:

"In 2005, a remarkable new class of cells was discovered in the medial entorhinal cortex of the rat, forming an important input to the hippocampus. As an animal moves about its environment, grid cells fire at an array of locations spanning the environment to form an equilateral triangular grid (see http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Grid_cells for more information). The crystal-like repeating symmetry of the grid cells' multipeaked firing patterns is unique and the grids form a completely novel and hitherto unanticipated type of neural representation. Doeller and colleagues (Nature, Feb 2010) showed that signatures of this grid system could be detected in fMRI data from humans exploring a virtual environment. However this was only possible using a complex retrospective analysis, so it was not possible to manipulate properties of the environment or task to examine the grid system's properties systematically. This project proposes a new method for localising the grid system efficiently, using an experimental design which fully exploits its remarkable and unique regularity. If this method proves viable, it will enable us to quickly localise the grid system in each individual so that its detailed properties and role in behaviour can be fully and thoroughly investigated."

Everyone is welcome to attend.

Best wishes Rebecca