Maintaining Brain Health

The Viva! Program Does active engagement improve cognitive function? Can we defer cognitive aging? The Viva! Study: Expose subjects to productive engagement for 15 hours of week for two or more months and include a matched control. Engaged subjects learn to quilt: visuospatial, motor, memory, social stimulation Subjects learning digital photography engaged memory, motor skills, working memory and also received social stimulation.

Active Engagement

Cultural Neuroscience: A New Take on Plasticity Is brain and cognitive function equivalent across cultures? Does culture affect brain organization or structure. Work with Michael Chee in Singapore

fMR-Adaptation Experimental Design Adaptation paradigm relies on an attenuated BOLD response to repetition. This slide shows different types of repetitions. In the Old-old condition, you would expect a generally decreased neural signal because all elements of the slide are repeated. In the Old-New condition, you would expect adaptation in the “object area,” because the object is repeated. So you should see a decrease is neural regions that respond exclusively to object (lateral occipital gyrus). In the new-old, you should see a decrease in neural signal in brain regions that respond to background scenes (parahippacampal place area). Finally, when both elements of the scene change, you should see activation in the region that “binds” targets to context when contrasting new/new with old/old. SD = Stimulus duration (1500ms) IPI = Inter-Picture Interval (250ms) IQI = Inter-Quartet Interval (range: 6000, 9000, 12000 ms; mean = 9000ms)

Old asians have NO object area; old Americans have a diminished object area. Both culture and age exert effects SG Method of obtaining voxel maps Voxel maps of regions showing adaptation to object, background, and object-background binding repetition as defined by the following conjunction of contrasts (as detailed in previous slides): Object NN-OO NN-ON NO-OO NO-ON Background NN-NO ON-OO ON-NO Binding (NN-OO)-{(NN-ON)+(NN-NO)} Note that statistical values of voxels were the lowest levels of significance amongst the contrasts within the conjunctions. That is, if we were identifying object-processing regions, and if the values of significance for relevant contrasts performed in one voxel were as shown below: NN-OO – t = 2.00 NN-ON – t = 3.00 NO-OO – t = 4.00 NO-ON – t = 5.00 the resulting statistical value for that voxel in the voxel map would be t=2.00. Also, the algorithm used for the conjunction analyses only considered voxels in which ALL contrasts gave a positive statistic (t-value). If at least one of the contrasts gave a negative t-value or zero, then the resulting conjunction is zero. Therefore if the values for the same prior example were: NO-OO – t = -4.00 the resulting statistical value for that voxel in the voxel map would be t=0. Please refer to notes in next slide for points regarding SG and USA voxel map data and results. US Goh et al., 2007, CABN P < .005 (uncorr)