Neural Plasticity in Sensation and Cognition

Tuesday, October 25, 2011 — Concurrent Symposia Session III
2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.	Balcony A

Co-chairs

• David Leopold, NIMH
• Bruno Averbeck, NIMH

Program

Our daily interaction with other people and with the environment depends on complex, evolved neural circuits that are able to sense, interpret, and respond to a wide range of stimuli. The brain's sensory and cognitive circuitry is inherently malleable, with many neurons changing their responses based on experience or in response to injury. Studying how the brain reprograms its responses to stimuli requires carefully controlled testing paradigms, often using animal models, in which the responses of neurons or populations of neurons can be tracked longitudinally over seconds, days, or weeks during normal experience, in the context of learning, or in response to injury. This symposium will focus on recent technological and conceptual advances in the study of neural plasticity, highlighting research at the NIH that sheds light on the brain's inherent propensity for functional reorganization.

Assembly Mechanisms for Heteromeric Kainate Receptors *FARE Winner
Janesh Kumar, NICHD

Multiple Forms of Neural Plasticity Combine to Extract Features From Sensory Stimuli
Mark Stopfer, NICHD

Long-Term Plasticity Driven by Reward Association Learning in Monkey Inferotemporal Cortex
David McMahon, NIMH

Robust Memory of the Reward Value of Visual Objects in the Nigro-Collicular Pathway
Masaharu Yasuda, NEI

Can We Use Structural MRI Techniques to Assess Plasticity in the Human Brain Non-invasively?
Cibu Thomas, NIMH

Impact of Impaired Sensory Input on Cortical Processing and Perception: Insights from Macular Degeneration and Amputation
Christopher Baker, NIMH

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