2023-2024 Psychology Department
Colloquium Speaker Series
presents
Lauren DiNicola
Postdoctoral Fellow
Harvard University
Examining the Organization and Functions of Parallel Networks in the Human Brain
Every day, we recall past experiences, consider others’ feelings, imagine future plans, and communicate. These cognitive abilities are hallmarks of our species, and all have been linked to regions of association cortex (furthest from primary sensory and motor areas). Association regions also show disproportionate evolutionary expansion and prolonged postnatal development in humans, making them intriguing targets for understanding the flexible forms of thought that emerge and mature as we grow. Recently, precision neuroscience techniques have revealed multiple interwoven networks within association zones. My work uses within-individual approaches to measure these networks with high anatomical precision and explore functional properties across tasks designed to dissociate and unpack cognitive processes. In this talk, I will describe our discoveries that multiple, parallel networks in human association cortex are distinctly specialized to support memory, social and language functions. Right next to these are additional distributed networks supporting domain-flexible functions, like cognitive control. All of these networks feature side-by-side regions, forming clusters in a repeating organization across the brain. These surprising results help revise our understanding of how interwoven networks support different facets of cognition and provide the foundation for new questions about how parallel organization arises in the cortex, which specific processes these networks support, and how functional roles might be sculpted across development, including during periods with high risk for psychopathology.
Monday, February 19, 2024
12:30pm
390 Gilmer Hall