New paper looking at age-related differences in resting-state fMRI activity, by Jean-François Nankoo, Chris Striemer, and collaborators.

“Our results show that anodal tDCS improves discrimination threshold for optic flow perception, but only for left-right motion in contrast to up-down motion discrimination. This result was evident within the first 10 min of stimulation and was also found post-stimulation. Cathodal stimulation did not have any significant effects on performance in any direction.”

Dr Christopher Madan gave the weekly seminar for the McGill University Douglas Cerebral Imaging Centre. This talk was focused on work investigating novel brain structure measures to examine aging and the relationship between different measures of cortical structure.

New paper looking at age-related differences in resting-state fMRI activity, by Stan Hrybouski, Nikolai Malykhin, and collaborators.

“Our age comparisons of network topography and inter-network FC demonstrated a substantial amount of age invariance in the brain’s functional architecture. Despite architecture similarities, old adults displayed a loss of communication efficiency in our inter-network FC comparisons, driven primarily by the FC reduction in frontal and parietal association cortices.”

“The brain processes underlying impairing effects of emotional arousal on associative memory were previously attributed to two dissociable routes using high-resolution fMRI of the MTL (Madan et al. 2017). […] Here, whole-brain fMRI revealed prefrontal contributions: dmPFC was more involved in hippocampal-dependent negative pair learning and vmPFC in extrahippocampal neutral pair learning.”

“Learning to play a musical instrument involves mapping visual + auditory cues to motor movements and anticipating transitions. Inspired by the serial reaction time task and artificial grammar learning, we investigated explicit and implicit knowledge of statistical learning in a sensorimotor task […] using a computer glove.”

Gambling Research Exchange Ontario (GREO) wrote a summary on our recent Addiction paper, take a look!

2020 is coming to a close and I hope you are all able to take a bit of a break.

Looking forward to a more joyous 2021.

“Fractal dimensionality (FD) measures the complexity within the folds and ridges of cortical and subcortical structures. We tested the degree that FD might provide a new perspective on the atrophy-compensation hypothesis: age or disease-related atrophy causes a compensatory neural response in the form of increased brain activity in the prefrontal cortex to maintain cognition. […] Multivariate analyses revealed that the lower FD/higher brain activity pattern was associated with poorer cognition—patterns not present in young adults, consistent with compensation.”

Dr. Madan has now officially completed his Post-Graduate Certificate in Higher Education and been certified as a Fellow of AdvanceHE (FHEA).

Medical education paper in collaboration with Rakesh Patel, and second paper for Mark Higgins!

“Deliberate practice informed SBME interventions appeared effective for developing surgical skills among trainee surgeons, however the reliability of these conclusions was limited by the modest quality of the research studies and the design elements of deliberate practice were inconsistently applied. There was little evidence that deliberate practice led to skills retention beyond 30 days, although participant numbers were low and the quality of studies was modest.”

Several great presentations at the Psychonomic meeting!

Affective Bleed: The Transfer of Valence to Novel Episodes (Madan, Elizur, Tuen, Esposito, & Palombo)

Computational Accounts for Episodic Memory in Reinforcement Learning (Ksander, Madan, & Gutchess)

Semi-Automated Transcription and Scoring of Autobiographical Memory Narratives (Wardell, Esposito, Madan, & Palombo)

Exploring the Facets of Emotional Episodic Memory: Remembering ‘What,’ ‘Where,’ and ‘When’ (Checknita, Te, Madan, & Palombo)

[also additional posters at affiliated meetings]

“The definition of episodic memory, as proposed by Tulving, includes a requirement of conscious recall. As we are unable to assess this aspect of memory in nonhuman animals, many researchers have referred to demonstrations of what would otherwise be considered episodic memory as ‘episodic-like memory.’ Here the definition of episodic memory is reconsidered based on objective criteria.”