Advances in Neuroscience

Timetable

Module aim (aims)

1. Module aimsAs a scientific study of the nervous system, contemporary Neuroscience is a discipline at the crossroads of biology, physiology, anatomy, kinesiology, neuro- and experimental psychology, as well as mathematical modeling. Its ultimate goal is to understand both the fundamental and functional properties of neural systems, and the emerging behavior. Indeed, as relevant to many traditional social science disciplines, it is a very rapidly developing branch of science. The goals of the lecture series are the following: • to review the state-of-the-art in anatomical, functional, and network approaches to vision, haptics, the control of behavior, and language processing;• to study the latest and impactful research reports in each of these domains;• to understand the essentials of research design, data analyses, and interpretations of their outcomes in the area of functional neuroimaging (fMRI) and neurostimulation (TMS).Therefore, these lectures will cover a wide range of recent neuroscience review and research papers on visual, sensorimotor, task positive, and task negative processing in the human brain. A rich array of research questions will be addressed, starting from how the brain allows us to see and “feel” (haptically) objects, their functions, letters/words and their meaning, how and why people fail in these tasks, and what insights contemporary neuroscientists can bring to support their neurorehabilitation.Upon the completion of the lecture series, students will be re-acquainted with basic concepts from each of the reviewed domains, and familiarized with advanced models and approaches to studying visual, sensory/motor and language processing in the brain.

Pre-requisites in terms of knowledge, skills and social competences (where relevant)

Knowledge of basic concepts in vision, somatosensation, perception, action, and language processing will be helpful in understanding of the discussed lecture material. Yet, there are no specific prerequisites because the lecture and recommended textbook chapters cover them all.

Syllabus

Week 1: Functional anatomy of the cerebral cortex with the emphasis on early visual processing Week 2: Higher-order visual processing in the human brain Week 3: Category selectivity in the ventral cortexWeek 4: The origins of multimodality in visual object areas Week 5: Multi-modal parcellations of human cerebral cortexWeek 6: The human somatosensory systemWeek 7: Neural coding within areas involved in visually and haptically guided actionsWeek 8: Sensorimotor-independent development of hand and tool selectivity in the visual cortexWeek 9: Function/affordance and its processing in the parieto-frontal dorsal pathwaysWeek 10: Neural bases of tool use and generalized motor programsWeek 11: The neural underpinnings of object perception and basic reading skillsWeek 12: Origins of the specialization for letters and numbers in occipito-temporal cortexWeek 13: The language control networks, their intrinsic connectivity, and types of lateralizationWeek 14: The origins of atypical language representation and its relation to other brain functionsWeek 15: Structural and functional brain asymmetries in human situs inversus totalis

Reading list

The recommended textbooks:Kandel, E.R., Schwartz, J.H., Jessell, T.M., Siegelbaum, S.A., Hudspeth, A.J., 2013. Principles of Neural Science, Fifth Edition. McGraw-Hill Companies, USA. (Only selected and most relevant chapters/sections from this textbook will be covered.)Palmer, S. E. (1999). Vision Science. Photons to phenomenology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Only selected and most relevant chapters/sections from this textbook will be covered.)Basic and supplemental references:(1) Avanzini, P., Abdollahi, R.O., Sartori, I., Caruana, F., Pelliccia, V., Casaceli, G., Mai, R., Lo Russo, G., Rizzolatti, G., Orban, G.A., 2016. Four-dimensional maps of the human somatosensory system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 113, E1936-1943.(2) Dehaene, S., Cohen, L., Morais, J., Kolinsky, R., 2015. Illiterate to literate: behavioural and cerebral changes induced by reading acquisition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16, 234-244.(3) Galletti, C., Fattori, P., 2018. The dorsal visual stream revisited: Stable circuits or dynamic pathways? Cortex 98, 203-217.(4) Glasser, M.F., Coalson, T.S., Robinson, E.C., Hacker, C.D., Harwell, J., Yacoub, E., Ugurbil, K., Andersson, J., Beckmann, C.F., Jenkinson, M., Smith, S.M., Van Essen, D.C., 2016a. A multi-modal parcellation of human cerebral cortex. Nature 536, 171-178.(5) Glasser, M.F., Smith, S.M., Marcus, D.S., Andersson, J.L., Auerbach, E.J., Behrens, T.E., Coalson, T.S., Harms, M.P., Jenkinson, M., Moeller, S., Robinson, E.C., Sotiropoulos, S.N., Xu, J., Yacoub, E., Ugurbil, K., Van Essen, D.C., 2016b. The Human Connectome Project's neuroimaging approach. Nature Neuroscience 19, 1175-1187.(6) Hannagan, T., Amedi, A., Cohen, L., Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Dehaene, S., 2015. Origins of the specialization for letters and numbers in ventral occipitotemporal cortex. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 19, 374-382.(7) Labache, L., Joliot, M., Saracco, J., Jobard, G., Hesling, I., Zago, L., Mellet, E., Petit, L., Crivello, F., Mazoyer, B., Tzourio-Mazoyer, N., 2018. A SENtence Supramodal Areas AtlaS (SENSAAS) based on multiple task-induced activation mapping and graph analysis of intrinsic connectivity in 144 healthy right-handers. Brain Struct Funct.(8) Lesourd, M., Osiurak, F., Navarro, J., Reynaud, E., 2017. Involvement of the Left Supramarginal Gyrus in Manipulation Judgment Tasks: Contributions to Theories of Tool Use. J Int Neuropsychol Soc 23, 685-691.(9) Orban, G.A., 2016. Functional definitions of parietal areas in human and non-human primates. Proceedings. Biological sciences 283, 20160118.(10) Osiurak, F., Lesourd, M., Delporte, L., Rossetti, Y., 2018. Tool Use and Generalized Motor Programs: We All Are Natural Born Poly-Dexters. Sci Rep 8, 10429.(11) Osiurak, F., Rossetti, Y., Badets, A., 2017. What is an affordance? 40 years later. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 77, 403-417.(12) Peeters, D., Vanlangendonck, F., Rueschemeyer, S.A., Dijkstra, T., 2019. Activation of the language control network in bilingual visual word recognition. Cortex 111, 63-73.(13) Potok, W., Maskiewicz, A., Kroliczak, G., Marangon, M., 2019. The temporal involvement of the left supramarginal gyrus in planning functional grasps: A neuronavigated TMS study. Cortex 111, 16-34.(14) Sakreida, K., Effnert, I., Thill, S., Menz, M.M., Jirak, D., Eickhoff, C.R., Ziemke, T., Eickhoff, S.B., Borghi, A.M., Binkofski, F., 2016. Affordance processing in segregated parieto-frontal dorsal stream sub-pathways. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 69, 89-112.(15) Schuler, A.L., Bartha-Doering, L., Jakab, A., Schwartz, E., Seidl, R., Kienast, P., Lackner, S., Langs, G., Prayer, D., Kasprian, G., 2018. Tracing the structural origins of atypical language representation: consequences of prenatal mirror-imaged brain asymmetries in a dizygotic twin couple. Brain Struct Funct 223, 3757-3767.(16) Striem-Amit, E., Vannuscorps, G., Caramazza, A., 2017. Sensorimotor-independent development of hands and tools selectivity in the visual cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 114, 4787-4792.(17) Tal, Z., Geva, R., Amedi, A., 2016. The origins of metamodality in visual object area LO: Bodily topographical biases and increased functional connectivity to S1. Neuroimage 127, 363-375.(18) Tzourio-Mazoyer, N., Joliot, M., Marie, D., Mazoyer, B., 2016. Variation in homotopic areas' activity and inter-hemispheric intrinsic connectivity with type of language lateralization: an FMRI study of covert sentence generation in 297 healthy volunteers. Brain Struct Funct 221, 2735-2753.(19) van den Hurk, J., Van Baelen, M., Op de Beeck, H.P., 2017. Development of visual category selectivity in ventral visual cortex does not require visual experience. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 114, E4501-E4510.(20) Vingerhoets, G., Li, X., Hou, L., Bogaert, S., Verhelst, H., Gerrits, R., Siugzdaite, R., Roberts, N., 2018. Brain structural and functional asymmetry in human situs inversus totalis. Brain Struct Funct 223, 1937-1952.(21) Yeo, D.J., Wilkey, E.D., Price, G.R., 2017. The search for the number form area: A functional neuroimaging meta-analysis. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 78, 145-160.