About the YIA Award

The purpose of the Young Investigator Award is to recognize outstanding contributions by scientists early in their career. Two awardees, one male and one female, are named by the Awards Committee, and are honored at the CNS annual meeting.

Congratulations to Muireann Irish and Michael W. Cole for being awarded the 2019 Young Investigator Award. Muireann Irish and Michael W. Cole will give their award lectures on Monday, March 25, 2019, 1:30 –2:30 pm, in Grand Ballroom A of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Hotel.

Rethinking the episodic-semantic distinction: New insights from the dementias

Muireann Irish
Associate Professor Muireann Irish, Brain & Mind Centre and School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, Australia

Our memories are our most prized possessions, enabling us to revisit defining events from the past and guiding us towards adaptive behaviours in the future. The relative ease with which we mentally navigate back and forth through subjective time belies the incredible complexity of these processes. It is only when memory begins to fail that we can truly appreciate its intricacy and inherent vulnerability. Neurodegenerative disorders provide compelling insights into the cognitive architecture of human memory systems in the face of progressive and coordinated neural insult. In this lecture, I will provide an overview of my work exploring past- and future-oriented expressions of memory in Alzheimer’s disease and semantic dementia; neurodegenerative disorders characterised by progressive deterioration of the episodic and semantic memory systems, respectively. These syndromes have provided unique insights into the functional organisation of autobiographical memory and future thinking, highlighting the necessary interplay between episodic and semantic processes in supporting cognitively sophisticated endeavours. As such, I hope to provide a refined understanding of the fundamental neurocognitive mechanisms which support past and future thinking, as well as highlighting the continued importance of conducting patient work in the era of neuroimaging.

Brain network organization as the computational architecture of cognition

Michael W. Cole
Assistant Professor, Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience (CMBN), Rutgers University – Newark

Understanding neurocognitive computations will require not just localizing cognitive information distributed throughout the brain but also determining how that information got there. Brain connectivity clearly has something to do with it, and decades of “connectionist” (and recent “deep learning”) theory suggests connectivity patterns specify distributed neural computations. I will share my laboratory’s efforts to map the human brain’s large-scale functional network organization and to determine how that organization shapes distributed cognitive processes. Central to these efforts is the estimation of activity flow – the movement of evoked activity through brain network connections. Estimating activity flow quantifies the likely contribution of a network organization (such as one estimated using resting-state functional connectivity) to function-specific activity patterns (such as fMRI responses to cognitive events). This is accomplished via a predictive algorithm based on neural network modeling but parameterized using empirical data. I will cover application of activity flow mapping to predict whole-brain activation patterns across a variety of tasks, such as tasks involving working memory, rapid instructed task learning, and natural vision (movies), as well as in the context of pre-clinical Alzheimer’s disease. I will also emphasize related methods combining theoretical and empirical approaches to better understand neurocognitive computation. As we advance the activity flow framework – improving functional connectivity estimation and algorithmic details – we are getting closer to the long-term goal of producing empirically-derived task-performing computational models of brain function. These developments promise to better integrate theoretical/computational neuroscience and empirical neuroscience with mutual benefits across both fields.

 

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Previous Winners

2019	2018 Morgan Barense, University of Toronto Michael Yassa, University of California, Irvine
2017 Leah Somerville, Ph.D., Harvard University Nicholas Turk-Browne, Ph.D., Princeton University	2016 Adriana Galvan, UCLA Joel Voss, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
2015 Donna Rose Addis, Ph.D., University of Auckland, NZ Christopher Summerfield, Ph.D., University of Oxford	2014 Daphna Shohamy, Ph.D. , Columbia University David Badre, Ph.D., Brown University
2013 Uta Noppeney, Ph.D., University of Birmingham, UK Tor Wager, Ph.D., University of Colorado	2012 Adam Aron, Ph.D., University of California San Diego Roshan Cools, Ph.D., Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
2011 Michael J. Frank, Ph.D., Brown University Elizabeth Kensinger, Ph.D., Boston College	2010 Kara Federmeier, University of Illinois Adam Anderson, University of Toronto
2009 Lila Davachi, New York University Clayton Curtis, New York University	2008 Charan Ranganath, University of California Davis Kevin Ochsner, Columbia University Rebecca Saxe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2007 Silvia A. Bunge, University of California Steven Laureys, MD, University of Liège	2006 Frank Tong, Vanderbilt University Alumit Ishai, University of Zurich
2005 Sabine Kastner, Princeton University Kevin LaBar, Duke University	2004 Anthony Wagner, Stanford University Eleanor Maguire, University College London
2003 Roberto Cabeza, Duke University Sharon Thompson-Schill, University of Pennsylvania	2002 Isabel Gauthier, Vanderbilt University Randy Buckner, Washington University Saint Louis