► CANCELED: Caltech Brain Imaging Center Seminar

Title: Mind the (Neurophysiological) Gaps! How to Empower Human Cognitive Neuroimaging Research

Abstract: After three decades of intensive and highly successful research, enthusiasm about human cognitive neuroimaging appears to be waning. This may partially relate to the success of animal neurophysiology, where technological developments allow insights into (seemingly) more sophisticated aspects of brain-behavior relationships. In my talk, I will argue that these developments should not be a source of resignation but instead motivate the field to build on such insights from neurophysiology and incorporate them into the way we employ human neuroimaging methods. While this may require new technologies in terms of hardware, algorithms, and models, it is noteworthy that several of these approaches do exist in principle but may not yet have been used to their full potential. I will give an overview of these approaches, as well as new emerging technologies, and hope to discuss with the audience how we may use them to re-ignite the excitement about the use of neuroimaging to elucidate neural foundations of human behavior.

This seminar is part of the "Future Advances in Multi-modal Neuroimaging Methods" series. Existing methods for measuring human brain function non-invasively such as fMRI, MEG and EEG have helped to considerably advance our understanding of human brain function over the past several decades. However, these methods suffer from substantial limitations in spatial and temporal resolution, thereby imposing major constraints on the kinds of neuroscience research questions that can be addressed in humans. This seminar series explores cutting-edge new technologies and methodologies for multi-modal imaging. We will ask whether such new approaches have the potential to overcome existing limitations and open up new research directions in human neuroscience over the coming decades.