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| Interuniversity Attraction Poles (IAP) P6/29 Website
"Perceptual and cognitive processing in the human and non-human primate brain"
An initiative funded by "Federaal Wetenschapsbeleid"
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Main objectives
- To study the visual system and its relationships with motor, memory and executive brain centers in human and non-human primates.
- To support cognitive neuroscience in Belgium. Given the diversity of research themes in the different research groups, the project covers a range of topics, all however studied in humans or non-human primates: the visual system and its modification by attention and learning; memory and higher visual functions, control of actions (uni- and bimanual), cerebellum, sleep and memory consolidation, working memory and executive functions; quantitative and sequence processing, DTI (diffusion tensor imaging) and connectivity.
- Collaborative experiments: these are based either on pooling of cognitive expertise in common human imaging studies or on linking human imaging with monkey studies addressing the same cognitive function/paradigm.
- To give independence to young researchers: the pilot group and other groups are multi-PI and the collaborative experiments will be steered by all these independent researchers.
- A new direction is the localization of functions for human imaging studies. We will get away from local maxima (as used in the program SPM, which can be a pact in a cortical region, a cortical region or a set of regions, e.g. LOC - lateral occipital cortex) and functional ROIs (which have no anatomical basis). We will follow the lead of monkey fMRI and attempt to define cortical regions to improve the anatomical aspect of the functional localization studies. We intend to produce new cortical maps (using Caret) onto which the results obtained in the different studies of the consortium will be pooled
- Sharing technological developments: in vivo tractography, integration fMRI/EEG and functional connectivity.
- To set up the imaging facilities as resources that will be accessible to other groups: especially the monkey imaging at Laboratorium voor Neuro- en Psychofysiologie.
Workplan
Work has been divided into six workpackages, which include twelve collaborative experiments or sets of experiments.
- Workpackage 1: Perceptual, cognitive and motor learning:
This workpackage uses single cell recording, awake monkey and human fMRI to investigate the neuronal changes induced by low level and high level visual perceptual learning and compares visual, motor and cognitive learning.
- Workpackage 2: Spatial attention:
The main goal of this workpackage is to investigate in detail the causal nature of interactions between prefrontal activity and that in the remainder of the monkey brain. We will use the unique combination of awake monkey fMRI with electrical microstimulation and reversible deactivation in monkeys performing passive viewing or a variety of spatial attention tasks. These data will be directly compared with traditional tract-tracing and in-vivo MR-based tractography measurements. For some ‘non-invasive’ experiments, we will also perform comparative human-monkey fMRI experiments.
- Workpackage 3: Controlled memory processes:
In this workpackage, the network draws on its extent to investigate cognitive processes that usually are studied in isolation: working, episodic and prospective memory, attention and reasoning. Moreover, there are links with studies on attention (workpackage 2), on inhibitory processes (workpackage 4), and contribution to functional description of precise brain regions (workpackage 5).
- Workpackage 4: Action observation and motor planning:
In this workpackage we study the visual properties of a type of premotor neurons and the motor plans they carry. These mirror neurons have been implicated in imitation learning and may underlie social interactions for which perspective taking is important. Parietal neurons also represent the intention to move the eyes and prefrontal structures can inhibit motor plans. This workpackage uses single cell recording, awake monkey and human fMRI.
- Workpackage 5: Mapping human cortical regions in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS)
The aim of the workpackage is to parcel the cortex in and around the IPS into a number of cortical regions, to get away from the present local maximum and region of interest (ROI) techniques. We will draw on four types of data: activation maps obtained with visual stimuli similar to those used to parcel monkey IPS, classification and correlation techniques to subdivide functionally the visual shape sensitive regions in IPS, activation maps obtained with clusters of cognitive tasks, in particular quantitative tasks, and probabilistic tractography. Given the variability between activation patterns in human subjects, we will map (using flatmaps) the cortical regions in individual subjects and in groups (random effects analysis).
- Workpackage 6: Technological developments
This WP uses single cell recording, awake monkey and human fMRI, computational techniques to compare in vivo tractography with histological ground truth, to compute functional connectivity from multielectrode recordings, to investigate the neural substrate of sleep and that of adaptation.
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| NEWSFLASH |
 IUAP - resting state network / ICA workshop, organised by Dante Mantini
Monday 22 February 2010, Leuven
Annual seminar series
The neural basis of number processing
Thursday April 8 and April 15, 2010, Gent
IAP Biannual Consortium Meeting
Friday May 21 2010, Antwerp
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