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Project

Representation of concepts in health & neurodegenerative disease: a subject-specific multivariate approach based on representational similarity analysis using fMRI and MEG

During this project, we want to investigate how concrete entities (animals, objects) are represented in the human brain. We will examine healthy controls and patients suffering from neurodegenerative disease. In our previous work, we discovered that when the meaning of words is more alike, the brain response patterns in the left temporal lobe are also more alike. We performed these studies on large groups of healthy young volunteers. Now, we want to examine the relationship between behavioral similarity and brain response patterns at the level of individual subjects. The project will start with a brain imaging experiment on healthy volunteers. For every participant, we will calculate the behavioral similarity between the 72 entities from our test set and compare this to the similarity in brain response patterns to these entities. This will provide us with information on which regions of the brain contribute to the processing of these entities. Patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Primary Progressive Aphasia experience language problems. Our tests are developed in such a way that these patients are also able to participate in the study. Our technique makes it possible to examine brain response patterns in the regions affected by the different subtypes of neurodegenerative disease. We will investigate the relationship between the language problems documented in the patients and their brain response patterns.

Date:1 Sep 2016 →  30 Sep 2020
Keywords:MEG, fMRI, neurodegenerative disease
Disciplines:Neurosciences, Biological and physiological psychology, Cognitive science and intelligent systems, Developmental psychology and ageing