There will be a departmental talk on 12 Oct (4pm) by Klaus Gramann. More details are provided below. Please note that the talk will be moved back to at AS7/01-17, Seminar Room B.

Title: Imaging embodied spatial cognition

Date/Time: 12 Oct 2010 (Tuesday), 4pm

Venue: AS7/01-17, Seminar Room B

Abstract:
Human cognition is embodied in the sense that cognitive processes are based on and make use of our physical structure while being situated in a specific environment. Brain areas and activities that originally evolved to organize motor behavior of animals in their 3D environments also support human cognition, suggesting that joint imaging of human brain activity and motor behavior could be an invaluable resource for understanding the distributed brain dynamics. However, due to technical constraints of traditional brain imaging methods, there is a lack of studies investigating the brain dynamics underlying actively behaving subjects. We have developed a mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI) modality to allow for synchronous recording of EEG, eye movement and body movements as subjects actively perform natural movements in 3-D environments. I will present data on simultaneous recording of whole-body movements and brain dynamics during free and naturally motivated 3-D orienting actions, combined with data-driven analysis of brain dynamics. This allows, for the first time, to study distributed EEG dynamics, body movements, eye, head and neck muscle activities during spatial cognition *in situ*.

About the speaker:
Dr. Gramann is a Project Scientist at Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience Institute for Neural Computation, UC San Diego. Dr. Gramann’s research interests includes the development of mobile brain/body imaging methods.