Action at a distance on object–related ventral temporal representations
22-11-2018 - 13:00
Seminar and meetings
The way the world is represented in visual associative cortex, and in particular in ventral temporal cortex, is relatively impervious to external changes in the stimuli. However, these representations are forged via interactions between network-specific modules. Here I will show how we can causally modulate ventral temporal representations, and overall, network-specific functional nodes, by disrupting high-level distal associative areas. I used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to stimulate left parietal associative cortex and functional MRI to measure object-related neural responses, and show that representational similarity, categorical discriminability, functional connectivity within and from ventral temporal cortex are enhanced by excitatory stimulation compared to inhibitory stimulation of left parietal associative cortex, and that overall, dynamics in the tool network are causally affected. These results show that ventral temporal representations and network dynamics can be causally modulated by distal processing.
Jorge Almeida
University of Coimbra, Portugal
Place Cardinal Mercier 10, Faculty of Psychology & Educational Sciences
Socrate -240
Floor number :-2
Louvain-la-Neuve