April 13–16 | 2024
CNS 2024 | Young Investigator Award Lectures
Congratulations to Peter Kok and Ella Striem-Amit for being awarded the 2024 Young Investigator Award. We look forward to hearing their award lectures at CNS 2024!
About the YIA Award
The purpose of the Young Investigator Award is to recognize outstanding contributions by scientists early in their career. Two awardees are named by the Awards Committee, and are honored at the CNS Annual meeting. This award is sponsored by The Chen Institute.
The neural circuit underlying subjective perception
Peter Kok, Ph.D.
Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London
Monday, April 15, 2024, 1:30 - 2:00PM (EDT), Ballroom Center + West
04/15/2024 1:30 PM
04/15/2024 2:00 PM
America/New_York
CNS 2024 | YIA - The neural circuit underlying subjective perception, Peter Kok
Ballroom Center + WestThe Young Investigator Award Lectures will be held in person at the CNS 2024 Annual Meeting in Toronto at the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel located at 123 Queen St W, Toronto, ON M5H 2M9, Canada
The way we perceive the world is strongly influenced by our expectations about what we are likely to see at any given moment. However, the neural mechanisms by which the brain achieves this remarkable feat have yet to be established. To understand the neural mechanisms underlying the interplay between sensory inputs and prior expectations, we need to investigate the way these signals flow at the level of cortical circuits, e.g. through the different cortical layers. Until recently, it was not possible to do this in non-invasive studies of humans, because the typical voxel size in fMRI is bigger than the full thickness of the cortex. I will discuss recent work in which we met this challenge by using fMRI at ultra-high field (7T) to obtain BOLD signals at very high resolution to disambiguate signals from the different cortical layers. This approach has allowed us to probe the neural circuitry underlying effects of expectation and subjective perception. I will also discuss the role of the hippocampus as a potential generator of top-down expectation effects in visual cortex, focusing on predictive stimulus representations in hippocampal subfields and informational connectivity with the visual cortex. Together, this work aims to shed new light on the neural circuitry underlying our perception of the world.
Insights from studying people with congenital sensorimotor deprivation
Ella Striem-Amit, Ph.D.
Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC.
Monday, April 15, 2024, 2:00 - 2:30PM (EDT), Ballroom Center + West
04/15/2024 2:00 PM
04/15/2024 2:30 PM
America/New_York
CNS 2024 | YIA - Insights from studying people with congenital sensorimotor deprivation, Ella Striem-Amit
Ballroom Center + WestThe Young Investigator Award Lectures will be held in person at the CNS 2024 Annual Meeting in Toronto at the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel located at 123 Queen St W, Toronto, ON M5H 2M9, Canada
What is the balance between nature and nurture in determining the function of cortical areas? A key way to answer this question is by studying people with congenital deprivation. What plasticity is evident when a brain area is deprived from birth of its typical input or outputs, and what can this tell us about cognitive representations? Furthermore, does deprivation affect every deprived brain similarly, or are plasticity patterns diverse across individuals?
I will present a series of studies examining the role of sensory and motor experience and specific sensorimotor features in the neural representations of objects and actions. Combining evidence from studies of people born blind and people born without hands, I will show how plasticity in these individuals’ brains allows us to infer the cognitive abstractness of neural representations along the cortical hierarchies.
Beyond broader patterns of plasticity, I will show evidence for a larger diversity of brain patterns in blindness and deafness, which opens new questions about differential developmental trajectories and functions for the deprived cortex, and how these may affect restoration of function on an individual level.
Throughout, I will highlight the different ways that studying congenital deprivation across domains can illuminate the cognitive neuroscience of the typically developed brain.
Previous Winners
2023Anna Schapiro, Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania |
2022Oriel FeldmanHall, Brown University |
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2021Anne Collins, UC Berkeley |
2020Catherine Hartley, New York University |
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2019Muireann Irish, The University of Sydney, Australia |
2018Morgan Barense, University of Toronto |
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2017Leah Somerville, Ph.D., Harvard University |
2016Adriana Galvan, UCLA |
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2015Donna Rose Addis, Ph.D., University of Auckland, NZ |
2014Daphna Shohamy, Ph.D. , Columbia University |
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2013Uta Noppeney, Ph.D., University of Birmingham, UK |
2012Adam Aron, Ph.D., University of California San Diego Roshan Cools, Ph.D., Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour |
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2011Michael J. Frank, Ph.D., Brown University |
2010Kara Federmeier, University of Illinois |
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2009Lila Davachi, New York University |
2008Charan Ranganath, University of California Davis |
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2007Silvia A. Bunge, University of California |
2006Frank Tong, Vanderbilt University |
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2005Sabine Kastner, Princeton University |
2004Anthony Wagner, Stanford University |
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2003Roberto Cabeza, Duke University |
2002Isabel Gauthier, Vanderbilt University |
April 13–16 | 2024