You are invited to attend a lecture by

By

Prof. Andreas Keil

Department of Psychology and NIMH Center for the Study of Emotion & Attention

University of Florida

on the subject:

Quantifying spatio-temporal brain connectivity using electrophysiological methods: evolutionary spectra, synchrony, causality, and dependency

The brain is the ultimate complex system with billions of components that communicate locally and at long range. Progress in understanding this system requires trans-disciplinary efforts combining expertise in the behavioral, biological, and engineering sciences. In this presentation, we will discuss applications that highlight basic neurophysiological system properties of active tissue in the human brain, as it changes over time. As an experimental framework, we employ classical conditioning as one of the most elemental forms of learning. We also assume that the temporal dynamics of large-scale brain networks carry meaningful information, which leads us to focus on electro- and magnetoencephalography to test model assumptions. A basic tenet of this approach is that when nodes of a distributed system or sub groups engage in communication there is a transient exchange of information that reflects dependencies and causation. On the part of experimental, design, data processing, and data analysis, modalities are needed that allow researchers to highlight and isolate meaningful interactions. The talk discusses approaches that use external driving (entrainment) of sensory cortices to extract informative variables, which are then subjected to different measures of connectivity and causality. The need for developing novel measures of dependency and causality is explained, and illustrated with examples from experimental data.