New Paradigms for Interpretable Metrics of Human Brain Function: From Low-Level Sensations to High-Level Decisions

Time: Thursday, March 27, 2014 - 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Type: Seminar Series
Presenter: Simon Kelly Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering City College of New York
Room/Office: Becton Seminar Room
Location:
Becton Seminar Room
15 Prospect St
New Haven, CT 06520
United States

Yale University Department of Biomedical Engineering

Seminar Series


When: Thursday, March 27th, 2014

Place: Becton Seminar Room

Time: 4pm


“New Paradigms for Interpretable Metrics of Human Brain Function:

From Low-Level Sensations to High-Level Decisions

 

Simon Kelly

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering

City College of New York

 

Abstract: Noninvasive neurophysiology and neuroimaging techniques have long held great promise in revealing details of healthy and dysfunctional human brain mechanisms that are otherwise obscured in behavioral assays alone. In practice, however, gaining such insights is a huge challenge due to severely limited resolution. In my talk I will describe a number of new human electrophysiological paradigms that have been developed to provide direct experimental access to low-level and high-level brain processes of considerable fundamental and clinical interest, namely, the cortical balancing of neural excitation and inhibition, the signals governing perceptual and value-based decision formation, and the signatures of lapsing attention. The crucial common feature among these paradigms is their simplicity; sensory stimulation and task requirements are stripped-down to a degree that naturally exposes the core computational elements involved in the brain processes under study. I will describe recent basic research findings and follow-up clinical investigations that exploit this approach.