New Publications

By Dimitrios Pinotsis, on 2 October 2013

• A. Oswal, P. Brown and V. Litvak. Synchronised neural oscillations and the pathophysiology of Parkinsons disease, Current Opinion in Neurology (in press)
• J.D. Lopez, V. Litvak, J.J. Espinosa, K. Friston, G.R. Barnes. Algorithmic procedures for Bayesian MEG/EEG source reconstruction in SPM. (Neuroimage, in press)
• Ashwini Oswal, Vladimir Litvak, Christof Brücke, Julius Huebl, Gerd-Helge Schneider, Andrea A. Kuhn, Peter Brown. Cognitive factors modulate activity within the human subthalamic nucleus during voluntary movement in Parkinsons Disease (to appear in the Journal of Neuroscience)
• MJ Allman, S Teki, TD Griffiths, WH Meck. Properties of the Internal Clock: First-and Second-Order Principles of Subjective Time. Annu. Rev. Psychol, 2014
• Barron HC, Dolan RJ, Behrens TE. Online evaluation of novel choices by simultaneous representation of multiple memories. Nat Neurosci. 2013 Sep 8. doi: 10.1038/nn.3515.
• Laurence T. Hunt, Mark W. Woolrich, Matthew F. S. Rushworth, Timothy E. J. Behrens. (2013) Trial-Type Dependent Frames of Reference for Value Comparison. PLOS CB. 9(9): e1003225. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003225

PLORAS updates

By Dimitrios Pinotsis, on 2 October 2013

• 18 June 2013: Professor Cathy Price gave a keynote lecture entitled ‘Connecting fMRI to Lesion Studies’ at the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) Conference, Seattle.
• 27 June 2013: Professor Cathy Price presented ‘Towards a Clinical Application of PLORAS’ and Louise Lim presented a summary of the PLORAS focus groups (see here ) at the Neurology Staff Round, Newcastle University Medical School.
• 15 August 2013: Zula Haigh from the Language Group presented on the PLORAS project to stroke survivors at Maldon and Dengie Stroke Support Group.

• 13 September 2013: Zula Haigh from the Language Group presented on the PLORAS project to stroke survivors at the Stroke Association Lewisham group.

• 17 September 2012: Members of Speakeasy (an aphasia charity) took part in a focus group to give feedback on the PLORAS website, to help make it as accessible as possible for stroke survivors with aphasia.
• Rachel Browne held an exhibition stand at the British Aphasiology Society Biennial International Conference in Manchester (9-11 September 2013) – giving information on the PLORAS project listening to feedback, and advising clinicians how to get involved via the Stroke Research Network. See pictures below and a video here .

The PLORAS project (Language Group) also featured in the Different Strokes Summer Newsletter in an article where research participant Penny, who has aphasia, explains why she chose to take part in PLORAS. Different Strokes is a charity for younger stroke survivors. You can read it here.  The newsletter goes out to 12,000+ people and is then also downloadable from the Different Strokes website and they put a link on their Facebook group and Twitter.

Paper covered by the New Scientist

By Dimitrios Pinotsis, on 2 October 2013

Helen Barron’s new paper was covered by the New Scientist. A quote: “Tea jelly was
popular,” says Barron. “Beetroot custard not so much.” Read more here .

Best Paper Award

By Dimitrios Pinotsis, on 2 October 2013

Peter Smittenaar received a “Best Contributed Paper Award” for the Reinforcement Learning
and Decision Making conference.

Language group website

By Dimitrios Pinotsis, on 28 June 2013

New Publications

By Dimitrios Pinotsis, on 28 June 2013

Parkinson, O. Korzyukov, C. Larson, V. Litvak, D. Robin. Auditory feedback modulation of
effective connectivity in voice control. (Neuropsychologia, in press 2013)

Brodersen, K. H., Daunizeau, J., Mathys, C., Chumbley, J. R., Buhmann, J. M., & Stephan,
K. E. (2013). Variational Bayesian mixed-effects inference for classification studies.
NeuroImage, 76, 345–361. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.03.008

Hope TMH, Seghier ML, Leff AP, Price CJ. Predicting outcome and recovery after stroke
with lesions extracted from MRI images. NeuroImage: Clinical. 2013;2:424–33.

Adams RA, Stephan KE, Brown HR, Frith CD, Friston KJ. The computational anatomy of
psychosis. Front Psychiatry. 2013 May 30;4:47. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2013.00047.

Teki S, Chait M, Kumar S, Shamma S, Griffiths TD. Segregation of complex acoustic scenes
based on temporal coherence. eLife (in press)

Mindset of an actor

By Dimitrios Pinotsis, on 25 March 2013

Ray Dolan was part of a unique roundtable event at the Global Center for Academic and
Spiritual Life in New York organized by the Emotional Brain Institute which focussed on
the scientific mind of an actor. The roundtable comprised of Academy Award winner
Philip Seymour Hoffman and actor Tim Blake Nelson, who recently co-starred in
“Lincoln”. More details here: http://nyunews.com/2013/03/07/hoffman-2/

and a photo here.

Big Picture: Inside the Brain

By Dimitrios Pinotsis, on 25 March 2013

A video about the Language group’s research called ‘Big Picture: Inside the Brain’ will
be screened at the Barbican Neuroscience Festival Wonder Street Fair.

Details:

Sunday 7 April, 12.00-18.00; Monday 8 April, 12.00-19.30; Tuesday 9 April, 12.00-19.30
(Barbican Foyer) The Barbican Foyer springs to life with free drop-in activities,
performance, interaction and demonstrations. From cave painting to motion sensors and
from eye-trackers to body illusions, come along and knit a neuron, test your reactions and
pit your wits against brain scientists. With more than 20 different activities to stimulate,
inspire and amuse your little grey cells.

New Publications

By Dimitrios Pinotsis, on 25 March 2013

Klein-Flugge MC, Barron HC, Brodersen KH, Dolan RJ, Behrens TE (2013). Segregated
encoding of reward-identity and stimulus-reward associations in human orbitofrontal
cortex. Journal of Neuroscience 33(7): 3202-3211.

Teki S, Barnes GR, Penny W, Iverson P, Woodhead Z, Griffiths TD, Leff AP (2013). The
right hemisphere supports but does not replace left hemisphere auditory function in
patients with persistent aphasia. Brain (in press).

Upcoming Talk: Vision Sciences Meeting

By Dimitrios Pinotsis, on 27 February 2013

Altered perceptual bistability in binocular rivalry through neurofeedback training of high order visual areas

 Jinendra Ekanayake¹, Ged Ridgway¹, Frank Scharnowski^2,3, Joel Winston¹, Koush Yury², Nikolaus Weiskopf¹, Geraint Rees¹

¹Wellcome Trust Center For Neuroimaging, University College London
²Institute of Bioengineering, Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL)
³Department of Radiology and Medical Informatics – CIBM, University of Geneva

Neurofeedback using real-time fMRI (rtfMRI) enables voluntary control of activity within a target brain region. By subsequently testing how such voluntary control of brain activity affects perception or behaviour, it is possible to establish a causal link between brain activity and behaviour We hypothesized that neurofeedback training of higher order visual areas would lead to a change in conscious perception that can be measured using a binocular rivalry (BR) paradigm. To test this hypothesis, brain signals and perception were measured during binocular rivalry between face and house stimuli in ten participants. Participants were then separated into two groups and learned up-regulation of either the fusiform face area (FFA) or the parahippocampal place area (PPA) using rtfMRI neurofeedback.Following training, participants reported BR again, this time either with or without simultaneous up-regulation of one of the target brain regions. During post-training BR without up-regulation, a significant decrease in duration and switch rate of the ‘untrained’ percept (i.e. a house when they learned to increase activity in the FFA, or a face when they learned to increase activity in the PPA) was observed, with no significant change in the perception of the stimulus linked to the trained region. During BR with up-regulation, there was a further decrease in the duration and switch rate of the ‘unmodulated’ percept which was significant (i.e. a house while concurrently up-regulating activity in FFA following training on FFA up-regulation, or a face while concurrently up-regulating activity in PPA following training on PPA up-regulation). We conclude that voluntary modulation of high order visual areas using rtfMRI neurofeedback causes lasting changes of BR dynamics and behaviour.