Dear Colleagues,

On Friday, March 20th, the McGill Psychology Department will be hosting Dr ANNA CHRISTINA (KIA) NOBRE from the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity and Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. Dr Nobre will deliver a Hebb Lecture at 3.30pm in Stewart Biology Building, Room S1/3.

Dr Nobre holds a position of Statutory Chair in Translational Cognitive Neuroscience and is a Professorial Fellow at St. Catherine’s College at University of Oxford. Her research examines how neural activity linked to perception and cognition is modulated according to memories, task goals, and expectations. In addition to these basic mechanisms, she is interested in how these develop over the lifespan, and how they are disrupted in psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. Her work integrates behavioral methods with neuroimaging techniques, such as EEG, MEG, MRI and TMS.

Main Lecture (3.30pm, Stewart Biology Building, Room S1/3) Title: Premembering Perception

Abstract: Standard models of ‘attention’ are mostly concerned with the prioritisation of perceptual analyses according to our current goals. Substantial progress has been made in understanding the neural systems and mechanisms involved. The standard view is that top-down, goal-related signals maintained in working memory influence perceptual competition to select relevant items and inhibit distraction in the environment by acting upon receptive-field properties of events. However, top-down biases are not restricted to operate through receptive-field properties; they can also act upon the predicted timings of events as well as upon other, higher-order properties. Furthermore, short-term goal-related signals are not the only source of top-down influences upon perception. In everyday cognition, our long-term memories also play a major role in guiding the proactive and dynamic anticipation of events. In my talk, I will review studies from our laboratory that investigate how we can orient attention dynamically, taking into account the predicted timings of events; and how we use long-term memories to guide perception. Our findings suggest that in addition to being essential for assembling fragments of past experiences so that we can ‘remember’ them, memories are equally important for projecting predictions to guide assembly of cohesive percepts from incoming stimulation, working together with our current goals to ‘premember’ perception.

Following the lecture, everyone is invited to join us for a wine-and-cheese reception in the lobby of the 8th floor of the Stewart Biology Building. If you would like to meet with Dr Nobre individually, please contact me at jelena.ristic@mcgill.camailto:jelena.ristic@mcgill.ca.

Morning Seminar (10:00am, Stewart Biology Building, Room N7/14) Title: Temporal expectations: The fourth dimension in attention.

Abstract: Proactive and dynamic ‘attention’ mechanisms continually regulate the prioritisation, selection, and integration of information to focus our perception on the relevant events to guide behaviour within the current context. The last few decades have witnessed tremendous advances in unveiling the modulatory mechanisms of attention based on receptive-field properties of neurones, such as spatial locations or sensory features. But, mechanisms of selective attention are not restricted to receptive-field properties. Attention mechanisms also enhance perception based on the anticipated timing of relevant events. The question addressed in this lecture is how temporal expectations can come to tune neural excitability to the relevant moments of our unravelling environment. The lecture will provide examples of novel experimental tasks for manipulating temporal expectations, and will draw on results from psychophysics and non-invasive recordings of human brain activity. Findings reveal novel mechanisms for tuning anticipatory attention functions over time, which interact strongly with other top-down attention biasing mechanisms. Neural oscillations appear to provide an important conduit for adjusting neural excitability dynamically based on temporal regularities and predictions in the environment.

Graduate students interested in attending lunch with Dr Nobre are invited to contact the student host Dana Hayward at dana.hayward@mail.mcgill.camailto:mathieu.landry2@mail.mcgill.ca.

Please feel free to circulate this notice widely.

Best,

Jelena Ristic

Jelena Ristic, PhD Assistant Professor & William Dawson Scholar Department of Psychology McGill University 1205 Dr. Penfield Avenue Montreal, QC, H3A 1B1 Canada Phone: (514) 398 2091 Fax: (514) 398 4896 Email: jelena.ristic@mcgill.camailto:jelena.ristic@mcgill.ca Web: http://asc.mcgill.ca