Brainmap: Local and large-scale oscillatory neuronal dynamics in human cognition and behavior

Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - 12:00
Seminar room 2204, 149 13th St., Charlestown Navy Yard

Satu Palva, Ph.D.
Neuroscience Center
University of Helsinki, Finland
 
Attention and working memory (WM) are introspectively coherent but the neuronal processing underlying these functions is distributed both anatomically and spectrally. The systems-level mechanisms binding this distributed processing into coherent cognition are incompletely understood. We have investigated with magneto- and electroencephalography (MEG/EEG) recordings whether local oscillations and inter-areal synchronization are correlated with behavioral performance in attention and WM tasks and show that concurrent local oscillation amplitude modulation and changes in inter-areal synchronization are correlated with behavioral variability in these tasks. Hence, local and inter-areal oscillatory dynamics could reflect the integration of neuronal processing mechanistically into coherent attention and WM.