Please note new location for Thursday’s colloquium.
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The Human Connectome Project: Progress and Perspectives
David C. Van Essen, Ph.D.
Alumni Endowed Professor of Neurobiology
Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology
School of Medicine
Washington University in St. Louis
Thursday, March 21, 2013
4:00 p.m.
Auditorium, 2nd floor – Mellon Institute
A reminder that the second speaker in the LRDC 50th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture Series will take place on Thursday, March 21, 2013. The talk, and reception that follows, will take place at the University of Pittsburgh University Club at 3 pm.
Kate Nation Professor of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, and Fellow, St. John’s College, Oxford, presents “Learning to Read and Learning to Comprehend.”
Please feel free forward this information to anyone you think might be interested in Dr. Nation’s talk and encourage students in your program to attend.
For planning purposes, please RSVP here:
http://www.lrdc.pitt.edu/50th/rsvp/rsvp2db_nation.asp
The talk and the reception are free and open to the public.
Rapid flexibility of the motor cortex in novel situations
Marc H. Schieber, MD, PhD
Professor
Departments of Neurology, Neurobiology & Anatomy, Brain &
Cognitive Sciences, Visual Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering
University of Rochester
School of Medicine and Dentistry
Rochester, NY
Thursday
April 11, 2013
2:00 pm
6014 Biomedical Science Tower 3
“Harnessing the Dynamics of Neural Networks”
Large, strongly coupled neural networks tend to produce chaotic spontaneous activity. This might appear to make them unsuitable for generating reliable sensory responses or repeatable motor patterns. However, this is not the case. Inputs can induce a phase transition, leading to responses uncontaminated by chaotic “noise”. Likewise, appropriately trained feedback units can control the chaos, resulting in a wide variety of repeatable output patterns. Recently, these ideas have been extended to more realistic network models with spiking outputs.
“Probability Logic and Human Reasoning”
Niki Pfeifer
Visiting Research Scholar, Center for Formal Epistemology (CMU)
Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (LMU)
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
12:05 pm, 817R Cathedral of Learning
Abstract: The traditional psychology of deductive reasoning was characterized by the use of fragments of first-order logic as a rationality framework to study human inference. Recently, various probabilistic approaches have become popular in the psychology of deductive reasoning. In my talk I will advocate “coherence based probability logic” as a promising rationality framework for investigating reasoning under uncertain and incomplete knowledge. Specifically, I will critically discuss recent formal and empirical work on the interpretation of indicative conditionals, Aristotle’s thesis, and selected paradoxes of the material conditional. Moreover, I will present a formal measure of argument strength and show how it provides a new solution to an epistemic version of the Ellsberg paradox.
It is award season in the entertainment industry, and we in Psychology were feeling a little left out. Cut to the February 27th faculty meeting….
One unsuspecting graduate student was invited to attend under the guise of “We need the expertise of a 4th year health/social student.” Expertise about what? Perhaps where Sheldon buys his colorful sweaters or why Brooke doesn’t yet own a house (or an Ipad, a convertible, the list is endless). But I digress. That student’s name is Dianne Palladino, and she is the very deserving winner of this year’s Graduate Teaching award having received course evaluations that anyone in the department would be proud of. Dianne is joined on the metaphorical winners’ podium by Dussy Yermolayeva, who was recently awarded the Dick Hayes award for services to the department. Please help the Psychology Department in congratulating both of these outstanding students.
CMU Language Technologies Institute Colloquium
Title: Understanding audition via sound analysis and synthesis
Speaker: Josh McDermott, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
Date: 1 March 2013
Time: 2.30-3.30 PM
Location: WEH 7500, CMU
Abstract:
Humans infer many important things about the world from the sound
pressure waveforms that enter the ears. In doing so we solve a number
of difficult and intriguing computational problems. We recognize sound
sources despite large variability in the waveforms they produce,
extract behaviorally relevant attributes that are not explicit in the
input to the ear, and do so even when sound sources are embedded in
dense mixtures with other sounds. This talk will describe my recent
work investigating how we accomplish these feats. The work stems from
two premises: first, that understanding perception requires
understanding real-world sensory stimuli and their representation in
the brain, and second, that a theory of the perception of some
property should enable the synthesis of signals that appear to have
that property. Sound synthesis can thus be used to probe phenomena
inaccessible to conventional experimental methods. I will discuss two
related strands of research along these lines. The first strand uses
sound textures (as produced by rain, swarms of insects, or galloping
horses) as a window into the auditory system, synthesizing textures
from statistics of biological sound representations as tests of the
perceptual relevance of different acoustic measurements. The second
strand uses naturalistic synthetic sounds to reveal new aspects of
sound segregation. Together they indicate that simple statistical
properties of auditory representations capture a surprising number of
important perceptual phenomena.
Speaker Bio:
Josh McDermott is a perceptual scientist studying sound, hearing, and
music. His research investigates human and machine audition using
tools from experimental psychology, engineering, and neuroscience. He
is particularly interested in using the gap between human and machine
competence to both better understand biological hearing and design
better algorithms for analyzing sound.
McDermott obtained a BA in Brain and Cognitive Science from Harvard,
an MPhil in Computational Neuroscience from University College London, a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Science from MIT, and postdoctoral training in psychoacoustics at the University of Minnesota and in computational neuroscience at NYU. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.
Upcoming Events:
· Monday, February 18th, Department of Psychiatry with Shin-ichi Kano, MD, PhD, “Brain disorders in a dish: toward a mechanistic understanding of mental illness”
· Tuesday, February 19th, Department of Psychiatry with Minae Niwa, PhD, “Developmental trajectory of brain maturation and adult behavior: relevance to mental illness”
· Thursday, February 21st, Department of Psychology Developmental Brown Bag with Diane L. Williams, PhD, CCC-SLP, “Language Processing in Autism: Insights from Functional Imaging”
· Thursday, February 21st, Department of Psychiatry with Maria Bleil, PhD, “Reproductive aging over the life course: Understanding inter-relations between ovarian function, psychological health, and cardiovascular risk”
· Friday, February 22nd, Department of Psychiatry with Yanhua Huang, PhD, “Sleep Regulation of Reward: Neural Adaptations in the Nucleus Accumbens”
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Special Guest Speaker
Sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry
Shin-ichi Kano, MD, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Johns Hopkins University
“Brain disorders in a dish: toward a mechanistic understanding of mental illness”
Date: Monday, February 18th, 2013
Time: 12:00-1:00 PM
Location: Biomedical Science Tower
16th Floor Conference Room; Rm 1695
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Special Guest Speaker
Sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry
Minae Niwa, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
John Hopkins University
“Developmental trajectory of brain maturation and adult behavior: relevance to mental illness”
Date: Tuesday, February 19th, 2013
Time: 12:00-1:00 PM
Location: Biomedical Science Tower
16th Floor Conference Room; Rm 1695
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Developmental Brown Bag
Featuring
Diane L. Williams, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
Associate Professor, Department of Speech-Language Pathology
Duquesne University
Language Processing in Autism: Insights from Functional Imaging
Thursday, February 21, 2013
12 – 1 p.m.
Martin Room (4127) Sennott Square
Department of Psychology
Abstract: Behavioral measures have provided limited understanding of the bases for the language differences in verbal, high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). These individuals frequently score within the average range on standardized language measures even as they have difficulty with the comprehension and use of language in daily life. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a noninvasive methodology that has provided an unprecedented opportunity to examine the underlying neural processing while an individual performs a cognitive task. Functional MRI studies with young children, adolescents, and adults with ASD, using a variety of language tasks, have revealed differences in the way individuals with ASD process language even without differences in behavioral performance. These results, though preliminary, provide insight into the challenges associated with ASD in the comprehension and production of language.
NB: You are receiving this as part of Portia Miller’s unofficial developmental mailing list, not the Psychology department’s official mailing, which will go out Tuesday. If you know of anyone else who might be interested in the talk, please forward. If you know of anyone who should be added to this contact list in the future, contact Portia (plm11@pitt.edu).
Questions about Developmental Brown Bags? Contact Jennifer Ganger (jganger@pitt.edu) or Portia Miller (plm11@pitt.edu)
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Special Guest Speaker
Sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry
Maria Bleil, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
University of California San Francisco
“Reproductive aging over the life course: Understanding inter-relations between ovarian function, psychological health, and cardiovascular risk”
Date: Thursday, February 21st, 2013
Time: 10:00 -11:00 AM
Location: Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic
4th Floor; Room 413
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Department of Psychiatry Lecture Series
Researchers on the Rise Lectures
Friday, February 22, 2013
12:00 pm
Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic 2nd Floor Auditorium
Sleep Regulation of Reward: Neural Adaptations in the Nucleus Accumbens
Yanhua Huang, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
Dr. Huang was appointed to the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh in 2012. During her graduate work at Johns Hopkins University and her postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School she studied synaptic transmission and plasticity as regulated by glial glutamate transporters and immune molecules in the context of learning and memory. As a postdoctoral fellow at Washington State University, Dr. Huang began to focus on neural plasticity within the brain reward circuitry following exposure to addictive drugs, from which she has developed an interest in the cellular and molecular mechanism by which sleep regulates reward seeking behaviors. With support from a career development award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, she is pursuing research designed to combine electrophysiological approach and behavioral assays to investigate the links between sleep and reward seeking.
Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of this lecture, participants will be able to:
1. Describe the high comorbidity between sleep disorders and psychiatric diseases including depression and drug addiction.
2. Conceptualize sleep deprivation as a useful tool for probing the mechanisms underlying sleep regulation of emotion/motivation.
3. Understand that sleep may impact emotion/motivation by regulating neural activity within the brain reward circuitry, including the nucleus accumbens (in rodents).
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Using Proteomics Strategies to Identify Vulnerabilities to Addiction and Develop Novel Treatments
Mary Torregrossa, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
Dr. Torregrossa earned her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan and completed postgraduate neuroscience training at the Medical University of South Carolina and postgraduate training in psychiatry at Yale University. Her research focuses on determining the neurobiological mechanisms underlying vulnerability to addiction and identifying new treatments to prevent relapse in abstinent addicts. In addition, Dr. Torregrossa is interested in how stress during vulnerable developmental periods affects the development of the prefrontal cortex and associated circuits, and how this may underlie risk for certain psychiatric disorders. She is investigating the phosphoproteomics of extinction and reconsolidation of drug memories with support from a federal career development award and has published in numerous scientific journals including the Journal of Neuroscience and Neuropsychopharmacology.
Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of this lecture, participants will be able to:
1. Conceptualize how stress during adolescence, through elevated glucocorticoids, affects risk for alcoholism-related behaviors.
2. Understand how proteomics techniques can be used to study drug addiction/alcoholism.
3. Understand how differential phosphorylation of proteins may be predictive of increased risk or resilience to having alcohol use disorders.
Continuing Education Credit: The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians. The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine designates this educational activity for a maximum of 1.5 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits TM. Each physician should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. Other health care professionals are awarded .15 continuing education units (CEUs), which are equal to 1.5 contact hours. In accordance with Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education requirements on disclosure, information about relationships of presenters with commercial interests (if any) will be included in materials which will be distributed at the time of the conference. WPIC is approved by the American Psychological Association to offer continuing education for psychologists. WPIC maintains responsibility for this program and its contents. This program is being offered for 1.5 continuing education credits.
Please contact Jeanie Knox Houtsinger at knoxjv@upmc.edu for more information regarding this lecture. We also invite you to visit our web site at www.psychiatry.pitt.edu for more information on lectures and educational events sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry
The Neural Substrate for Tool Usage and Imitation in Non-Human Primates: Exploring Evolutionary Mechanisms of Human Intelligence
Atsushi Iriki, D.D.S., Ph.D.
Senior Team Leader
Symbolic Cognitive Development
RIKEN Brain Institute
Research Professor
Kyoto University
Japan
Monday, February 18, 2013
12:00noon
Biomedical Science Tower South
Room S120
Maria Bleil, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
University of California San Francisco
“Reproductive aging over the life course: Understanding inter-relations between ovarian function, psychological health, and cardiovascular risk”
Thursday, February 21, 2013
10:00 -11:00 am
WPIC 413