Date: Friday, March 18, 2016
Time: 12:00 pm-1:00 pm
Speaker: Stefano Anzellotti, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Simons Fellow, Rebecca Saxe lab, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
Talk title: Uncovering the dialogue between brain regions: directed and multivariate connectivity methods and their application to the study of Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Abstract: When we perform a task, multiple brain regions are engaged. To understand the neural mechanisms that enable us to perform the task, we need to study how these regions interact. Importantly, the investigation of interactions between brain regions can help us to better understand Autism Spectrum Disorders, uncovering differences in neural processing between ASD participants and matched neurotypical controls. In this talk, I introduce novel techniques to study noninvasively in the human brain 1) directed interactions between brain regions (using deconvolution and temporal precedence), and 2) information exchange between brain regions in terms of fine-grained spatial patterns of activity (using a connectivity extension of multi-voxel pattern analysis), and their application to the study of networks of brain regions in ASD participants.