CAHBIR Neuroimaging Methods Seminar and Workshop Series

Presenter: Michael W. Cole

Associate Professor, Center for Molecular & Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers University-Newark

Title:

Brain Network Flows and the Generation of Cognitive Abstractions

Abstract:

From navigating a new city to learning new tasks, human brains must utilize a wide variety of representations to accomplish their goals. Understanding the origin and coordination of these representations will require determining how task-relevant information is generated by brain network interactions. I will share recent insights into these processes gained via activity flow modeling – an approach for creating neural network simulations from empirical brain data. This involves using empirical brain connectivity data to build computational models that generate task-evoked brain activity. Investigating the resulting model yields insights into the processes in the brain that generate that activity. The key construct bridging data and modeling is activity flow – the movement of neural activity over brain connections – which is key to computation in neural network models and is known to occur in real brains. I will share results that use the (open source) Brain Activity Flow Toolbox to identify brain network processes underlying the generation of visual categories (e.g., faces; see Figure), highly abstract cognition (e.g., rules), and motor responses (behavior). This approach has also been applied to understand the brain network processes underlying aberrant cognition in brain disorders such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. Together these findings demonstrate the utility of the activity flow modeling framework for discovering the network processes generating (healthy and unhealthy) cognition in the human brain, ultimately supporting the hypothesis that neural functions are generated (computed) by distributed activity flow processes that are specified primarily by connectivity patterns.

We hope you can join in person and that you will make every effort to do so. But if you can’t, you can join via Zoom.

The CAHBIR Neuroimaging Seminar and Workshop Series is a biweekly meeting where CAHBIR staff, users, and PIs gather to discuss and learn topics that are relevant to the community. They are usually lead by CAHBIR staff, but when appropriate, others take the reigns and occasionally, visiting speakers will deliver a talk. They take place in the newly renovated conference room in the Staged Research Building and are usually structured for one hour, though sometimes longer presentations will be scheduled with advance notice.