Symposia Sessions

Symposium Session 1, Grand Ballroom A
Sunday, March 22, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

Vertically integrating molecular-genetics, cognitive neuroscience, and psychology

Chair: Adam Green, Yale University
Speakers: John A. Fossella, Andreas Papassotiropoulos, Joseph H. Callicott, Colin G. DeYoung

Summary: Using cognitive neuroscience techniques to investigate neural expression of genetic variants is not only relevant for disease, it also has the potential to inform models of healthy cognitive function. The goal of this “cognitive neurogenetic” research is to integrate genes and their protein products with brain-based intermediate phenotypes and behavioral phenotypes. While the promise is considerable, so are the theoretical, statistical, and interpretive hazards. Psychological theory will be an indispensable pillar for building an understanding of gene-brain-behavior relationships, including rigorous development and validation of behavioral tasks. Another pillar will be the use of a systems approach that engages the complexity and non-specificity of gene effects as well as the interactions between and among genetic polymorphisms and brain systems. A third pillar is detailed molecular-genetic characterization of the effects of polymorphisms on gene expression. Fitting gene-(intermediate) phenotype associations to constraints established by molecular genetic data can help weed out spurious associations and provide the link to molecular-biological mechanisms that build and guide neural systems. This symposium will review vertically integrative approaches that help delineate the causal chain from gene to protein to brain to behavior, as well as statistical and methodological measures that help ensure meaningfully interpretable data.

Symposium Session 2, Grand Ballroom A
Monday, March 23, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

Neurobiology of human language and its evolution: Primate perspectives

Chair: William D. Marslen-Wilson, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
Speakers: James K. Rilling, Angela D. Friederici, Asif A. Ghazanfar, William D. Marslen-Wilson

Summary: The last decade has seen dramatic developments in our understanding of the neural and functional architecture of non-human primate systems that support the processing of complex auditory objects in general, and of conspecific vocal calls in particular. These developments are having an increasing influence on research into human language, making it possible to situate this work in a genuinely neuro-biological and evolutionary context. This symposium explores these exciting developments in four presentations. Two speakers come from the non-human primate research community. The first speaker will discuss evolutionary changes in the neural pathways connecting frontal and temporal cortices in the macaque, chimpanzee and human brain, in areas critical for key human linguistic capacities. The second speaker will focus on the multi-modal functional architecture underlying vocal communication in the macaque, and the implications of this for models of language evolution and function. Two further speakers come from human research exploring the cognitive neuroscience of language. The first focuses on left-hemisphere pathways supporting syntax, a faculty specific to humans, and combines research with adults and with children learning language. The second will focus on bi-hemispheric substrates for human language functions, placed in a broader primate perspective.

Symposium Session 3, Grand Ballroom A
Monday, March 23, 3:00 - 5:00 pm

The key to prevent the return of fear memories - extinction versus reconsolidation

Chairs: Daniela Schiller, New York University and Karim Nader, McGill University
Speakers: Mohammed R. Milad, Karim Nader, Marie-H Monfils, Daniela Schiller

Summary: The ability to modulate, suppress, or erase, fear memories is crucial for adaptive function in everyday life. Without such mechanisms, fear memories could abnormally persist and gain control over behavior. To date, two seemingly opposing mechanisms are suggested to block the return of old fear memories: 1) Extinction, where fear is suppressed by safe exposure to the fear-eliciting stimuli in the absence of the harmful outcome; 2) Reconsolidation, a phase where fear memories are labile upon retrieval, presumably in order to be strengthen or updated, but their re-storage can be dampened by pharmacological manipulations.
Although both mechanisms are based on triggering the fear memory, extinction leads to new safety learning, leaving the fear memory intact, while reconsolidation results in modification of the original trace. In this symposium we will cover seminal research investigating the neural mechanisms and theoretical conceptualizations of these phenomena. The speakers will cover a wide range of topics on the neuroscience of extinction and reconsolidation from rats, to humans, to psychopathology. We will discuss recent evidence for a potentially groundbreaking technique to erase emotional memories, by combining extinction and reconsolidation. Discovering the brain mechanisms for these phenomena is enhancing our understanding of emotion systems in the brain, and has important clinical implications.

Symposium Session 4, Grand Ballroom A
Tuesday, March 24, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

The fluidity of preferences: effects of choice and context

Chair: Ray Dolan, University College London
Speakers: Laurie Santos, Tali Sharot, Antonio Rangel, Paul Glimcher

Summary: Modern society presents individuals with more choices than ever before. We can select from a near-infinite number of possibilities where to live, who to marry, what to eat, and how to spend our leisure time. Traditional decision making theories assume that these choices are based on relatively stable preferences. In this symposium we argue that preferences are in fact highly unstable and susceptible to the context in which alternatives are presented. The focus of the symposium is on findings that begin to describe the cognitive and neural mechanisms mediating preference generation and their modulation by context. Santos and Sharot demonstrate how the mere act of choosing modifies our preferences; describing both the origins of this intriguing phenomenon in children and monkeys (Santos) and the underlying neural mechanisms in human adults (Sharot). Rangel will discuss how marketing strategies affect neural representations of experienced pleasure. Finally, Glimcher will present data from single LIP neurons that help explain how, and why, preferences are altered by changing choice sets. This diverse data all converge to one underlying theme: context-dependent preference volatility is a robust effect reflected in brain regions tracking subjective value (including striatum and OFC), and appears to be conserved across primate evolution.

Symposium Session 5, Grand Ballroom A
Tuesday, March 24, 1:00 - 3:00 pm

Representational similarity analysis – characterizing visual population codes for shapes, objects, and faces

Chairs: Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health and Geoffrey K. Aguirre, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
Speakers: James V. Haxby, Hans Op de Beeck, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Geoffrey K. Aguirre

Summary: The characterization of neuronal codes in terms of their representational content constitutes a challenge fundamental to cognitive neuroscience. One promising approach that has recently gained momentum is to characterize a neuronal population code by means of a representational dissimilarity matrix. For each pair of experimental conditions (e.g. each pair of stimuli), the representational dissimilarity matrix contains an entry reflecting the dissimilarity of the activity patterns associated with the two conditions. Intuitively, the representational dissimilarity matrix encapsulates the information carried by a given representation in a brain region or computational model. Representational similarity analysis (RSA) provides data-driven characterizations of representational content and allows us to quantitatively relate the three major branches of cognitive neuroscience –  behavioral experimentation, brain-activity experi¬men¬ta¬tion, and computational modeling – by comparing representational dissimilarity matrices. This symposium presents a series of novel findings on high-level visual representations at the interface between perception and cognition that have been obtained by means of RSA. These studies demonstrate the power of RSA to bridge fundamental divides of our science so as to relate human to monkey representations, cell-recordings to fMRI, and brain-activity data to behavioral measures and computational theory in an information-rich, quantitative framework that is well-motivated by cognitive theory.