Distinguished Lecture Series: Lars Nyberg (Umeå)
Nota bene: There will be an opportunity for Ph.D. students to meet and discuss with the speaker on Friday, 16 May 2008 at 10.00 (Lecture Hall, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience).
ABSTRACT
“A dysfunctional fronto-striatal brain system has been hypothesized to underlie cognitive deficits in normal aging and age-related diseases. In this presentation, evidence will be presented from several lines of investigation that support this hypothesis. First, findings from an fMRI study of normal aging will be presented that link age-related striatal changes to impaired transfer following training of a specific executive function, updating. Second, the results from a multi-modal fMRI-SPECT study on updating of long-term memory representations link dopaminergic striatal D2 neurotransmission to degree of neural activity in the prefrontal cortex. Further support for a role of striatal dopaminergic functioning for the performance on executive tasks was provided in a PET study that showed age differences in task-induced reduction in dopamine D1 binding. Finally, results from a study employing a mixed blocked/event-related fMRI design showed that newly diagnosed patients with Parkinsons disease were characterized by transient rather than sustained underactivation in several striatal foci. Collectively, these findings support and extend previous notions of the role of fronto-striatal systems in cognitive functioning.”
Map and Directions to Lecture Hall (pdf 105 kb)
Programme Distinguished Lecture Series 2008 (pdf 57 kb)
All lectures April-July 2008 (pdf 92 kb)
Professor Lars Nyberg, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Umeå, Sweden
All are welcome!
