Dear Users

There will be 2 talks this afternoon (4.30-5-.30 pm in YNiC):

1) Nora Vyas, King's College London

****"Brain Anatomical Changes in Childhood-Onset Psychosis: Insights from fMRI and MEG"

Abnormal neuronal connectivity in the “default mode” network has been implicated in schizophrenia. Although the precise role of the default mode network appears elusive, the component brain regions and associated cognitive processes in the default mode appear relevant in schizophrenia. This talk will provide an overview on neuroimaging studies identifying progressive brain changes in childhood onset schizophrenia (COS; onset before age 13), a rare and severe form of the adult-onset counterpart, and their biological full siblings. To study the “default network” across traditional frequency bands seen in electrophysiological literature, an ongoing project at the Child Psychiatry Branch, NIMH, has focused on investigating spontaneous magnetoencephalographic (MEG) patterns during eyes-closed resting-state in COS and their full healthy siblings. The findings will be discussed followed by conclusions and future directions.

Dr Nora S Vyas’s webpage: http://www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/staff/profile/default.aspx?go=11900

2) Tom Hartley, Department of Psychology

"Efficient Localisation of the Human Grid System"

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.

Rebecca