Chair: Jack B. Nitschke, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Speakers: Brian Knutson, Daniela Schiller, Jack B. Nitschke,
Jon-Kar Zubieta
Summary: Our expectations have an impact on our lives in multiple ways, including our perception of external events and our emotional responses to them. The impact can be positive, such as enhancing the pleasant emotions following success or mitigating the negative emotional consequences following adversity. The placebo effect is a prime example of the positive effects that expectations can impart. The impact of expectancy can also be negative, as seen in individuals with anxiety disorders. For them, expectations about possible negative events in the future can result in debilitating levels of worry and distress. This symposium covers seminal research investigating the neural instantiation of such expectancy effects. The speakers address a wide range of topics where expectancy plays an important role, including financial risk, fear learning, anxiety disorders, and placebo. One emerging theme is that the anticipation of emotional events activates the same brain areas that are recruited when those events are experienced. In addition, the research showcased here indicates overlap in the brain areas recruited by anticipatory function across the various domains of investigation covered. Discovering the brain mechanisms for these expectancy effects is enhancing our understanding of the power of expectancy, which in turn may inform clinical applications.
Chair: Rajeev Raizada, University of Washington
Speakers: Jim Haxby, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Rajeev Raizada,
Geoff Boynton
Summary: : Within any active brain region, many neural representations are intermingled. Because these representations are spatially colocalised, they may elicit the same levels of local average activation, with the result that neuroimaging studies have difficulty telling them apart. Recent studies analysing multi-voxel spatial patterns of fMRI activity are starting to provide new methods for accessing such neural representations, and for relating them to behaviour. This symposium presents examples of such research, from diverse cognitive domains. Jim Haxby will describe how pattern-based analyses reveal distributed representations of objects in visual cortex. Drawing parallels between human and monkey studies, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte will show how information-based fMRI can reveal the structure of categorical representations of faces and objects in inferotemporal cortex. In the domain of speech perception, Rajeev Raizada will show how the distinctness of phonetic representations in the brain can predict people's ability to hear non-native speech contrasts. Moving beyond stimulus-driven neural responses, Geoff Boynton will describe how feature-based attentional signals can be decoded from distributed cortical activity.
Chair: Tania Singer, University of Zurich
Speakers: A. D. (Bud) Craig, Tania Singer, Christian Keysers,
Kerstin Preuschoff
Summary: Recent studies in the emerging fields of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics have supported the view that anterior insula (AI) plays a crucial role in the processing of subjective feelings, empathy, and risk. The symposium provides an overview of different lines of research and suggests a common underlying role of insular cortex for these seemingly different capacities. Bud Craig reviews structural and functional evidence for a role of AI in interoceptive awareness, bodily states, and subjective feelings. Christian Keysers and Tania Singer then link this stream of research to recent empathy research in social neuroscience that suggests that AI plays an important role in the processing of pain, taste, and disgust in oneself as well as when one is empathizing with other people experiencing pain, taste, or disgust. Finally, Kerstin Preuschoff summarizes the latest findings of fMRI studies on risk in the context of economic decision making which indicate that AI plays an important role in the processing of subjective risk. The speakers discuss their findings in light of a common underlying function of AI as interoceptive cortex, in other words, as cortex serving to integrate information about contextual and internal bodily states into representations of subjective feeling states.
Chair: Lisa D. Sanders, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Speakers: Anna Christina Nobre, Angel Correa, Kathrin Lange,
Lisa D. Sanders
Summary: Decades of research have culminated in highly accurate and detailed models of the neural mechanisms that support spatially selective attention. However, selecting stimuli for preferential processing based on location is useful when more information than can be processed in detail is presented simultaneously and spread out in space. Much less is known about how perceptual systems deal with overwhelming amounts of information presented rapidly at a single location. Recent evidence indicates that temporally selective attention plays an important role in perception under these conditions. In this symposium, the effects of temporally selective attention on visual and auditory processing will be discussed. Further, data that detail the relationship between temporal and spatial expectations and compare the effects of endogenous and exogenous attention will be presented. The session will end with evidence that listeners employ temporally selective attention during speech processing. Overall, this research indicates that temporally selective attention plays a critical role in perception and comprehension of complex environments and suggests the extent to which temporally and spatially selective attention rely on shared neural systems.
Chairs: Denise Head, Washington University and Cindy Lustig,
University of Michigan
Speakers: Cindy Lustig, Adele Diamond, Ulman Lindenberger, Bradley L. Schlaggar
Summary: Increases in the power and sophistication of cognitive control and executive function are a critical part of intellectual and social development as children move through infancy, adolescence and early adulthood. On the other end of the age spectrum, breakdowns in these control functions are often blamed for older adults' difficulties in memory, attention and other domains. This symposium brings together leading researchers who have examined the development of cognitive control throughout the lifespan. A question of specific interest is how the brain deals with challenges to control at all stages of development. The heuristic "last in, first out" has been used to describe the development of cognitive control and its putative substrate, the prefrontal cortex. Does this heuristic hold true when applied to more specific executive functions (orienting, inhibition, task-switching) and their associated brain networks? Children and older adults sometimes show similar behavioral patterns on tests of cognitive control - how similar is the underlying brain function? These questions are of interest both from a lifespan perspective, and for understanding the basic taxonomy and functional anatomy of cognitive control.
Chair: Pierre Jolicouer, University of Montreal
Speakers: Edward K. Vogel, Ren้ Marois, Yaoda Xu, Pierre
Jolicoeur
Summary: We examine recent results from behavioral and neuroimaging studies that elucidate the functional and neural basis of visual short-term memory (VSTM). Although the storage capacity of VSTM is limited to about three objects, passage of information into this system appears critical for conscious awareness and cognitive control from visual input. We review research using a variety of methods including psychophysics, electrophysiology (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERPs), magnetoencephalography (MEG), wavelet analysis, and fMRI, that reveal the nature of the representations in VSTM and their role in cognition. Speakers in the symposium will address issues such as the basic unit of storage in VSTM, individual differences in storage capacity and attentional control, the neural loci and temporal dynamics of regions partcipating in the VSTM network, the involvement of VSTM in the attentional blink, memory for colours, shapes, letters, and words, and memory for content versus memory for spatial location (what vs.where). We will also examine encoding, retention, and retrieval using behavioral and neuroimaging methods.
Chair: Timothy T. Rogers
Speakers: Matthew Lambon Ralph, Eric Halgren, Timothy T.
Rogers, Richard Wise
Summary: Essentially all current theories about the neural basis of semantic knowledge agree that much of the content of our semantic memory is represented in brain regions that overlap with, or even correspond to, the regions responsible for perceiving and acting. The more global neuroanatomical organization of the semantic system remains, however, something of a mystery. One position holds that anterior temporal lobe (ATL) regions play a critical role in mapping between different sensory, motor, and linguistic representations distributed widely in cortex. This view originated with studies of patients with semantic dementia (SD), a disorder in which progressive impairment to semantic knowledge across all modalities of reception and expression is accompanied by progressive gray-matter loss and hypometabolism localized within anterior temporal regions. This view from neuropsychology seemingly contrasts, however, with findings from functional neuroimaging studies of healthy individuals, which routinely report semantic activation in posterior temporal, temporo-parietal, and prefrontal regions, but only rarely in ATL regions. This symposium aims to reconcile the apparent contradiction, through presentation of new evidence from converging methods, including rTMS, intracranial EEG, anatomically constrained MEG, functional and metabolic neuroimaging, comparative patient studies, and computational modeling.
Chair: Kevin N. Ochsner, Columbia University
Speakers: Daniela Schiller and Elizabeth Phelps, Jennifer S.
Beer, Christian Keysers, Kevin N. Ochsner
Summary: It has been said that humans are the Social Animal, and that what sets us apart from other species is the complexity of our social relationships and the culture it makes possible. To understand the neural mechanisms underlying these social abilities, recent functional imaging work has attempted to clarify the neural mechanisms underlying various socially-relevant behaviors, ranging from person perception to self-regulation, empathy and imitation. Despite mounting evidence that that the neural bases of social cognition are quite similar to those of emotion, little work has attempted to explain what this similarity might mean. Each talk in this symposium will shed light on this issue. Two talks (Schiller & Phelps, Beer) will show that brain systems typically associated with emotion the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex are essential for person perception, because targets for social judgments including ourselves have affective relevance. Two other talks (Keysers, Ochsner) will show that interactions among regions involved in motor control, affect, and mental state attribution underlie our tendency to take on the emotions of others and empathize with them. Taken together, these talks suggest that social cognition and emotion share common mechanisms that interact to support social behavior in multiple contexts.
Chair: Matthew Walker, University of California, Berkeley
Speakers: Marcos Frank, Gina Poe, Matthew Walker, Robert
Stickgold
Summary: The function(s) of sleep remain largely unknown, a surprising fact given the vast amount of time that this state takes from our lives. One of the most exciting, and contentious, hypotheses suggests that sleep is critical for learning and brain plasticity. Over the last decade, a large number of studies have begun to provide a substantive body of evidence in support of such sleep-dependent memory processing. This symposium offers a synthesis of this rich array of experimental evidence from leading international experts, spanning phylogeny and descriptive levels, ranging from molecules and cells, to networks, systems and cognitive neuroscience. We believe the symposium would offer fertile ground for lively discussions regarding the role of sleep in 1) memory encoding, consolidation, integration and association, and 2) the underlying brain basis of these effects; sleep-dependent plasticity.
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