New Directions in Cognitive Neuroscience

Andrew T. Smith - Professor of Visual Neuroscience and Director of MRI, Royal Holloway, University of London

CRS were proud to support Andy Smith's Talk at the CRS were proud to support Andy Smith's talk at the New Directions in Cognitive Neuroscience Symposium, held at the Centre for Cognition and Neuroimaging (CCNI), Brunel University on 2nd April 2007.

Functional MRI: Beyond the Blob

Click here to listen to the talk

Click the image above to view the sildes, and listen to Andy Smith's talk, which was recorded live. The talk is about 45 minutes long. This presentation has been converted into a Flash file and uses streaming technology, so that you can start watching without waiting for the entire file to download. The presentation will open in a new window and run from start to end automatically, or you can use the controls in the bottom right corner to pause and navigate from slide to slide if you prefer. Don't forget to turn on your speakers!

Having trouble viewing the presentation? Try downloading the latest version of Flash Player by clicking here.

Abstract

The standard fMRI group analysis is based on statistical detection of task-related brain activity that has a consistent location across brains. The use of this technique has revealed a great deal about the organization of the human brain. Arguably, it has revealed more than has neuropsychology and has done so in a much shorter time. Such studies continue to proliferate but, I shall argue, they have inherent limitations that severely reduce the life expectancy of the approach. One practical limitation is simply that averaging across brains (even though spatially normalised) discards much of the spatial precision that will form the bedrock of fMRI in the future. A more fundamental limitation is that, as has often been pointed out by critics, knowing where something occurs is not the same as knowing how it works. I shall review some promising avenues down which fMRI research may be able to move in order to overcome the limitations of the standard group analysis. I shall then illustrate one of them (the repetition suppression paradigm) with my own work on the processing of optic flow in the occipital cortex.

Professor Andrew T. Smith

Professor Andrew Smith is a research professor in visual neuroscience and the Director of MRI at Royal Holloway.

Research Interests

The sense systems, particularly vision. Use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques to elucidate visual processes in the human brain. Psychophysical studies of the early stages visual processing, particularly the detection of image motion.

Copyright © Cambridge Research Systems Ltd. Click for details.

^ Back to top