Talking Brains: September 2010

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Postdoctoral Fellow / Research Scientist Position -- Cognitive Neuroscientist in Adolescent Reasoning and Brain Development

Postdoctoral Fellow / Research Scientist Position
Cognitive Neuroscientist in Adolescent Reasoning and Brain Development

The Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas in collaboration with The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center seeks to fill a Postdoctoral Research position in Cognitive Neurosciences with a productive and innovative investigator whose research interests address brain plasticity, cognitive training and reasoning. Applicable research experience desired includes an understanding of hierarchical cognitive strategies that support higher-order reasoning processes to foster deeper understanding and strengthen overall brain function and reasoning during adolescence in daily life. Additional experience would be useful but not required in multi-modality neuroimaging platforms (electrophysiology, MR technology, PET, etc.) and genetic factors related to frontal lobe and higher order cognitive development in adolescence. The research may be applied to elucidate the emergence and treatment effects acquired during normal development and in brain injuries or psychiatric diseases such as Traumatic Brain Injury, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Addictions, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders, Mood Disorders, and Schizophrenia.

The Center for BrainHealth
School of Behavioral & Brain Sciences

Qualifications for the position include:
PhD, preferably completed in neuroscience, neuropsychology, neurocognition, or related field;
familiarity with fMRI, EEG, and physiological measures;
an ability to work well in a multidisciplinary, highly collaborative research team;
an interest in translational research between neuroscience and clinical populations;
and a strong record or potential for scholarly productivity.

The Center for BrainHealth is located in downtown Dallas adjacent to The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. The Center’s research is dedicated to applying cutting edge brain research to clinical populations to study brain plasticity. These projects cover a wide range of cognitive functions across the life-span, across a multitude of disorders, and across the most current functional brain imaging technologies. Established access available to special subject populations including: Alzheimers Disease (AD), Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (FTLD), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), ADHD, Autism, Military and Former Military, as well as healthy Aging, Stroke, Adolescent, and Pediatric groups. Access to state of the art facilities including: Philips 3T research-dedicated MRI scanner and Four Neuroscan SynAmps2 systems equipped for both 64 and 128 channel recordings.

Benefits of the job include:
*Ability to be involved with established, innovative, multidisciplinary collaborations.
*Ability to work on research projects highly relevant to health outcomes.
*Potential for high publication rate
*High potential for innovation in research design
*Competitive salary and benefits
*One year position, renewable for 2nd year based upon available funding, performance, and productivity

Submit application materials at http://provost.utdallas.edu/facultyjobs/welcome/jobdetail/pbv100810

Review of applicants will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled. The starting date for this position is September 1, 2010. Indication of gender and ethnicity for affirmative action statistical purposes is requested as part of the application.

The University of Texas at Dallas is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, age, citizenship status, Vietnam era or special disabled veteran’s status, or sexual orientation. UT Dallas strongly encourages applications from candidates who would enhance the diversity of the University’s faculty and administration.

Postdoctoral Fellow / Research Scientist Position -- Cognitive Neuroscientist in Adolescent Reasoning and Brain Development

Post docs and RA positions the University of Trento

Applications are invited for two postdoctoral positions and one RA/Lab-manager position funded by an ERC (European Research Council) Starting Grant (PI: Uri Hasson; http://www.hasson.org). Individuals of all nationalities are encouraged to apply. Inquiries can be addressed to uri.hasson@unitn.it, and meetings can be arranged at the Neurobiology of Language Conference. Application forms will be posted at http://bit.ly/bntHrv within 14 days.

The 4-year project examines the cognitive mechanisms and neural systems by which the human brain codes the recent past and predicts the immediate future. It uses neuroimaging, behavioral studies, and eye tracking methods. The ideal candidates are highly motivated and creative individuals, capable of working independently and in groups, who will thrive in a dynamic startup-like work environment. Experience with computational modeling of complex systems is helpful, as is prior work on neuroimaging of syntax/semantics. The research takes place at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences at the University of Trento, located in the autonomous region of Trentino in Northern Italy. Salaries are comparable to those offered by research institutions in the US and Europe, include benefits and health insurance, and are commensurate with training and experience. Expected starting date for all positions is Jan 1st, 2011.

Positions offered:

a. Postdoctoral position (2-4 years) for fMRI research. The person will be responsible for the design of several fMRI studies, conducting data analysis and leading the write-up of scientific work. The person will have access to the center’s onsite 4T fMRI scanner. REQUIREMENTS: expertise with fMRI design and analysis methods and a solid background in cognitive neuroscience. HELPFUL: knowledge of functional connectivity methods including those applicable to resting state data, analysis of perfusion (ASL) data, R/Matlab programming, good understanding of UNIX. Interest in MEG methods.

b. Postdoctoral position (2-4 years) for Magnetoencephalography (MEG) research. The person will be responsible for the design of several MEG studies, conducting data analysis and leading the write-up of scientific work. The person will have access to the center’s onsite MEG apparatus and 4T fMRI scanner. REQUIREMENTS: expertise with MEG techniques and a solid background in cognitive neuroscience. HELPFUL: Knowledge of coherence analysis and pattern classifier methods; knowledge of fMRI analysis techniques and the integration of fMRI and MEG data.

C. Research Assistant/ Lab Manager. A 2-year position is available. The individual will be responsible for analysis of fMRI datasets, programming and conducting fMRI studies, and monitoring computer hardware. This position is ideal for recent college graduates considering future graduate study in cognitive neuroscience. REQUIREMENTS: Experience with fMRI analysis and good knowledge of Italian. HELPFUL: a bachelor's degree in psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, or computer science. Experience with diverse computing environments (Linux/OSX/Windows), programming (python/perl/shell scripting, or R) and relational databases.

About the University of Trento: In 2009, The University of Trento ranked first in the Italian national ranking published by the Italian Ministry of Education. The ranking is based on the quality of the research and teaching activities, as well as the success in attracting funds from the European Commission, awarded for international research projects.

Center for Language Science Visiting Professor/ Sabbatical Fellowship in the Neuroscience of Language

The Penn State Center for Language Science (CLS; http://cls.psu.edu/) is seeking a visiting scholar with a distinguished record of research in the neuroscience of language, particularly researchers who use fMRI methods, to spend 2-3 months in residence during the academic year. A stipend of up to $45,000 will be provided, depending on the duration of the visit. The visiting professor will be expected to interact with CLS faculty and students and the larger Penn State neuroscience community (see http://www.imaging.psu.edu/people and http://www.huck.psu.edu/people) and to play a key role in developing fMRI expertise among students and faculty and creating potential collaborative projects. We anticipate making a visiting scholar appointment for each of the next five years. For the academic year 2010-2011, the visiting scholar may be in residence any time between January-August 2011. Interested applicants should send their inquiries and applications to languageneuro@gmail.com. The application should include a current CV, a set of representative and recent papers, the period of availability, and a statement indicating interest in contributing to the development of language neuroscience community at Penn State. Consideration of applications will begin on November 15, 2010 and applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Women and members of under-represented groups are especially encouraged to apply. Penn State is committed to affirmative action, equal opportunity and the diversity of its workforce.

The Center for Language Science has just been awarded a PIRE (Partnerships for International Research and Education) grant from NSF and the visiting scholar position is an institutional match to increase the presence of neuroscience on campus (http://live.psu.edu/story/48469).

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Disconnection between phonological input and output codes

Neuropsychology is not dead.

I just read an interesting case study, in the traditional neuropsych style with a detailed behavioral work up of a single stroke patient and an extended discussion of what the findings mean for models of language processing. I like it. I think we can still learn a lot from this sort of investigation.

The paper, by Jacquemot, Dupoux, and Bachoud-Levi (2007), reports on a patient, F.A., who suffered a left temporal-parietal stroke with a language profile typical of conduction aphasia: good comprehension, fluent production with occasional paraphasic errors and word-finding problems, and a significant deficit in repetition.

F.A. was administered a battery of tests including:

Syllable discrimination, minimal pair AX design. Performance = normal.

Auditory word-to-picture matching with semantic, phonological, and unrelated foils. Performance = normal.

Picture naming involving words of various length/frequency. Performance = "slightly impaired": 84% accuracy compared to 99.7% for controls; a marginal length effect for low frequency words, but not high frequency words.

Word repetition involving words of various length/frequency. Performance = mild/moderately impaired: 82.3% correct (cf. 99.7% for controls), with significant length and freq effects.

Non-word repetition with items of various length and high vs. low neighborhood density. Performance = SEVERELY impaired: 35.4% correct (cf., 99.6% correct for controls), with no length/density effect. Errors were predominantly phonemic.

What does this mean? Speech recognition systems appear to be intact (normal syllable discrimination), speech production systems are at least partially intact (only moderate deficits on picture naming and word repetition), but the link between the two systems is severely damaged (very poor nonword repetition). Non-word repetition is a particularly sensitive metric of the link between perception and production system because you have to use the lower-level sensory ("input lexicon") to motor ("output lexicon") route to perform the task; you can't circumvent this route by using the higher-order sensory->concept->motor route, which is presumably the mechanism allowing for substantially better word repetition performance.

As a further test, the authors assessed word and nonword reading. On this task F.A. showed no significant difference between words and nonwords and performed reasonably well on both (91.7% and 83.3% respectively). Maybe with more power a difference could be detected, but clearly the word/nonword performance difference is not nearly as dramatic as with the auditorily presented stimuli in the repetition task. In order to explain the good performance in reading nonwords, we must assume that written forms can access the "output lexicon" (motor speech systems) rather directly. This is reasonable: for example, think back to what you know about the phonological loop -- visual word forms seem to be able to gain access to this system via the articulatory mechanism. So again, this result suggests that the motor speech system is relatively intact with damage primarily to the connection between the sensory and motor systems.

Here is the model proposed by Jacquemot et al. as an explanation for F.A.'s performance. (Note: they believe in bidirectional sensory-motor connections, but only show the direction of the damaged link; see below):

For those of you schooled in traditional aphasiology, this should look really familiar as it is essentially the Wernicke-Lichtheim model (note: I use the model depiction that Lichtheim actually subscribed to rather than the more commonly used "house-model" depiction that he actually rejected based on the directional arrows. This depiction also accurately reflects W-L's belief in distributed conceptual representations):

The A-M disconnection in the Wernicke-Lichtheim model resulted in conduction aphasia (good comprehension, errors in otherwise fluent speech production), and F.A. certainly fit this profile clinically. It's amazing how right Wernicke was about so many things -- more on this in a subsequent post. In terms of more modern models, I've argued previously that the "disconnection" is due to damage to area Spt, which we argue supports sensory-motor transformations.

The one thing I disagree with in the Jacquemot et al. paper is the claim for an asymmetry in the connections between input and output systems. Jacquemot et al. claim that while the link between perception and production is impaired, the reverse link, from production to perceptual systems is not. They base this claim on tasks that they argue require phonological access first in the motor system and then transmission to the perception system. One task is written word rhyme judgment, the other is picture-auditory word rhyming. The assumption is that (i) decoding a word or picture into a phonological form can only be achieved on the motor side, and (ii) rhyme judgment is performed on the sensory side. I'm not convinced either of these assumptions are true.

Jacquemot C, Dupoux E, & Bachoud-Lévi AC (2007). Breaking the mirror: Asymmetrical disconnection between the phonological input and output codes. Cognitive neuropsychology, 24 (1), 3-22 PMID: 18416481

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Postdoc at NYU Abu Dhabi Neuroscience of Language Lab

A 4-year, potentially renewable post-doctoral position in the cognitive neuroscience of language is available for the NYU Abu Dhabi Neuroscience of Language Laboratory starting in summer 2011. The researcher will be working in the NYU Neuroscience of Language Lab under the direction of Dr. Alec Marantz, Dr. Liina Pylkkanen, and Dr. David Poeppel. The researcher will have had experience with evoked response experiments using either MEG or EEG, but preferably both. The main responsibility will be to explore appropriate ways to utilize participant populations of varied linguistic and educational backgrounds to address questions about linguistic universals and language specific effects. Working with Arabic and East Asian speakers requires nuanced understanding of the linguistic situation on the ground as well as a search for necessary corpus resources and area experts on the languages and language-particular psycholinguistics. A researcher with cross-linguistic experimental experience would be ideal for the job, and someone from either the Gulf area or India would be especially suited for this project.

To apply, please send a copy of your CV and a brief statement of research interests and goals to linguistics.neurolab@nyu.edu.

For more information about the NYU Neuroscience of Language Lab, please see
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/meglab/nellab/

important new data on adjectives and swear words

An important quantitative psycholinguistic analysis of adjectives in English from xkcd.com. Thanks to Jonathan Simon from UMD for pointing out this essential pattern of findings.

Important new data on Broca's area

A new paper in PLoS Biology by Katrin Amunts and colleagues from Germany provides exciting and important new data on anatomical subdivisions of Broca's area, particularly from the perspective of receptor distribution. They document, using a multireceptor approach, that there are considerably more subdivisions in areas 44 and 45 and surrounding tissue (and some interesting lateralization patterns) than we had come to expect from more traditional cytoarchitectonic studies. This paper certainly raises the bar in terms of what we need to know about the neurobiology of Broca's region. Being aware of this type of more detailed analysis of this part of the brain should help us prevent to promulgate the rather naive and monolithic interpretations that we tend to entertain (and publish). The abstract is below.

There is a considerable contrast between the various functions assigned to Broca's region and its relatively simple subdivision into two cytoarchitectonic areas (44 and 45). Since the regional distribution of transmitter receptors in the cerebral cortex has been proven a powerful indicator of functional diversity, the subdivision of Broca's region was analyzed here using a multireceptor approach. The distribution patterns of six receptor types using in vitro receptor autoradiography revealed previously unknown areas: a ventral precentral transitional cortex 6r1, dorsal and ventral areas 44d and 44v, anterior and posterior areas 45a and 45p, and areas op8 and op9 in the frontal operculum. A significant lateralization of receptors was demonstrated with respect to the cholinergic M₂ receptor, particularly in area 44v+d. We propose a new concept of the anterior language region, which elucidates the relation between premotor cortex, prefrontal cortex, and Broca's region. It offers human brain homologues to the recently described subdivision of area 45, and the segregation of the ventral premotor cortex in macaque brains. The results provide a novel structural basis of the organization of language regions in the brain.

Birdsong and Speech

In a session on animal communication at the Science of Aphasia meeting (Potsdam), Constance Scharff (Freie Universität Berlin) and Erich Jarvis (Duke University) gave two good presentations about their research programs on different aspects of vocal communication. Constance focuses more on the potential of the different FoxP2/FOXP2 preps and related approaches (her talk was about the ‘hope versus hype’ in foxp2 approaches). Erich’s work is oriented towards comparative work, looking in detail at the neural circuitry underlying vocal learning. Both focus on vocalization and communication -- and the toolboxes they have available are, to those of us working on the ‘awake behaving human prep,’ jealousy-inducing, of course. The research exemplifies a beautiful piece of biology. I am a big fan of this work.

There is no but … But I do want to insert a cautionary note -- and a suggestion for a new collaborative research effort. The laudable thing, obviously, is that Constance and Erich attended a meeting on linguistics and aphasia to begin with. They are among the very open-minded investigators, genuinely wanting to understand what’s going on in neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, biolingustics, linguistic theory – or whatever x-lingustics comes to mind. (For the record, I wish that other scientists interested in speech and language had the same drive; too often, studies about some aspect of language in other domains proceed without acknowledging that a rich and detailed literature exists. Imagine doing that in physics, say … that would be really weird.)

The really tricky part – for Constance and Erich, on the one hand, and for cognitive scientists, on the other – has to do with the potential alignments between the research programs. There is an (often explicit) desire to identify analogies between birdsong and speech/language. For example, some argue that a phoneme is perhaps like a note/syllable in birdsong; that a word is like a motif; that a sentence is like a bout … Presuppositions are made about how such representational units line up. But the key word here is ‘representation.’ When language researchers talk about syllabic structure, lexical entries, or phrasal combinations, these are technically specified notions that serve the purpose of investigating how language works in the human mind/brain. Implying that a bout is like a sentence comes with the assumptions and machinery (at least for cognitive scientists) that words/motifs are being combined to yield meaning that is arrived at by combining the pieces.

In my view, two things are noteworthy. First, it’s absolutely essential to separate speech perception and language comprehension when even discussing such analogies. The casual mixing of ideas from speech perception (e.g. do syllables matter) versus language comprehension (e.g. how do combinatorics work) is a recipe for confusion. There is much to be gained for cognitive neuroscience of speech perception by attending to the insights derived from birdsong. There is, however, much less gained for cognitive neuroscience of language comprehension. Second, and closely related, the significant insights we gain about sensorimotor transformation from birdsong research are very relevant to processing and learning speech perception and production, but that does not extend to language processing more generally. Again, it seems like it’s extremely important to be a “splitter,” conceptually speaking, and respect distinctions that have yielded useful descriptions of phenomena at different granularities.

It is my impression that the research being pursued in that domain (e.g. by Constance and Erich, but also by Todd Troyer, and Tchernikovski, and Woolley, and others) is making terrific progress in its own right, yielding genuine biological insight about the neurophysiological foundations of sensorimotor learning, development, neural coding, etc. Potential analogies to language are perhaps sometimes useful as heuristic devices (or useful as rhetoric in the context of grant applications), but potentially misleading if we take the parallelism too seriously. In my view, we should jump on this as a real opportunity for collaboration, injecting what cognitive science can contribute to the analysis of that vibrant area of research without making assumptions about weak (or dis-) analogies.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Friday, September 10, 2010

RESEARCH FACULTY POSITIONS at the BCBL- Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain)

RESEARCH FACULTY POSITIONS at the BCBL- Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain) www.bcbl.eu

The Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain) offers SENIOR research staff positions in several areas: language acquisition, production, multilingualism, neurodegeneration of language, language and learning disorders, neurocognition of language and advanced methods for cognitive neuroscience.
The Center promotes a rich research environment without teaching obligations. It provides access to the most advanced behavioral and neuroimaging techniques, including 3 Tesla MRI, a whole-head MEG system, four ERP labs, a TMS lab, an eyetracking lab, and several well-equipped behavioral labs. There are excellent technical support staff and research personnel (PhD and postdoctoral students). The senior positions are permanent appointments.

We are looking for cognitive neuroscientists or experimental psychologists with a background in psycholinguistics and/or neighboring cognitive neuroscience areas, and physicists and/or engineers with fMRI expertise. Individuals interested in undertaking research in the fields described in www.bcbl.eu (research) should apply through the Ikerbasque web page (www.ikerbasque.net).

Deadline September 30th

Candidates should have a strong publication track record.
For more information, please contact the Director of BCBL, Manuel Carreiras:
m.carreiras@bcbl.eu

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

2010 Neurobiology of Language Conference -- Scientific Program available online

The program for NLC 2010 is now available here. The meeting will be held on November 11-12. Conference website: www.neurolang.org

ENDOWED CHAIR IN NEUROIMAGING RESEARCH -- Univ. of S. Carolina

ENDOWED CHAIR IN NEUROIMAGING RESEARCH
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA

The University of South Carolina invites inquiries, nominations, and applications for an outstanding scientist to help establish the South Carolina Research Center of Economic Excellence (COEE) in Brain Imaging as part of a statewide Brain Imaging Center of Excellence. This position provides a unique opportunity to use the basic and clinical resources at USC to develop an area of advanced interdisciplinary research on human brain imaging. The McCausland Center for Brain Imaging, a Center of Economic Excellence within the Health Sciences South Carolina collaborative, provides high-resolution imaging for projects in cognitive, affective, and clinical neuroscience. With its new Siemens Magnetom Trio Total Body Magnetic Resonance Imaging system, the McCausland Center for Brain Imaging collaboratives will include faculty and researchers from the schools of Arts and Sciences, Public Health and Medicine at the University of South Carolina and from around the state.

Applicants should be Professor or advanced Associate Professor with training in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry, or clinical neuroimaging and have substantial experience using functional brain imaging to address questions concerning brain basis of cognition and behavior. A history of grant funding and experience leading a large and proven research team is required. In addition to running a successful research team, the selected candidate will participate in the hiring and mentoring of junior faculty in cognitive and behavioral science.

The University of South Carolina, founded in 1801, is one of three public research universities in South Carolina and spans an eight-campus, fully accredited state-supported system with approximately 40,000 students. Strong USC undergraduate and graduate programs and professional schools include Arts and Sciences, Medicine, Engineering, Business, Law, Education, Social Work, Pharmacy, Public Health, Mass Communications and Information Studies, and Nursing.

Inquiries and nominations should be sent by email to Professor John M. Henderson (john.henderson@sc.edu). Applications should be sent electronically to john.henderson@sc.edu, or to John M. Henderson, Neuroimaging Chair Search, Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, Columbia SC 29208. The University of South Carolina is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer. Minorities and women are especially encouraged to apply. The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation or veteran status.
Approved: CAD 8/27/10

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Talking Brains a finalist for Best Neuroscience Blog

Research Blogging has listed Talking Brains as a finalist for their 2010 Best Blog awards in the Neuroscience category. Blogs registered with Research Blogging are nominated, a panel of judges selects the top 5-10 in each category as finalists, then readers vote. TB didn't win the vote -- I guess extended discussions of signal detection methodology or endless posts on why mirror neurons are completely misunderstood is not entertaining enough :-). Oh well, at least we made the finals.

So which blog was the winner? Neurotopia

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Research staff positions at the MPI for Psycholinguistics

Research staff positions at the MPI for Psycholinguistics
Department Neurobiology of Language

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, the Netherlands) is offering three research staff positions in the field of Neurobiology of Language.

Research at our institute is done in a very inspiring research environment, without teaching obligations; furthermore, considerable technical support is available, as well as access to state of the art research and neuroimaging facilities (see www.donders.ru.nl), including MRI at 1.5, 3 and 7 Tesla, a whole-head MEG system, three ERP labs, a TMS lab, a Virtual Reality Lab, and multiple behavioural labs. The positions will become available between now and next summer. Dependent on the level of experience of the candidate, the term of appointment is 3 or 5 years.

We are looking for experimental scientists with a background in psycholinguistics, experimental psychology and/or neuroscience, who are interested in undertaking research in our department. A solid experimental background and experience with state of the art imaging methods is recommended. Candidates should have a strong publication track record. A track record in supervising PhD students would be welcomed. The focus of your research should fit into the overall research portfolio of the department, as described on our website (www.mpi.nl) under the projects Unification and Language in Action.

Applications should include:
(i) a CV;
(ii) a list of publications;
(iii) the names of two referees who would be willing to write letters of recommendation;
(iv) examples of published work;
(v) a cover letter describing research interests;

For information about the position, please contact Peter Hagoort (peha@mpi.nl).

Send applications to:
Ina Grevel (Secretary to Prof. dr. Peter Hagoort)
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Postbus 310
6500 AH Nijmegen
The Netherlands

fax: 31-24-3521213
e-mail: ina.grevel@mpi.nl
www: http://www.mpi.nl/research-groups/neurobiology-of-language-group

Deadline for receipt of applications: October 15, 2010.