Monthly Archives: December 2014

Park at Developmental Brown Bag, Thurs. 12/4 at 12:45 p.m.

Joonkoo Park of UMass Psychological and Brain Sciences (Developmental) will be presenting in the Developmental Brown Bag series in Tobin 423 at 12:45. Everyone is welcome.

Title: The Neural Basis of Numerical Intuition

Abstract: Humans are endowed with an intuitive sense of number that allows us to roughly perceive and estimate numerosity (i.e., the cardinal value of a set of items) without relying on language. Understanding the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie our numerical intuition has recently gained a huge attention for both theoretical and practical reasons. Yet, one central controversy in current research is whether our numerical intuition is indeed based on number or not. This topic is under hot debate because it has been unknown whether the mind and brain is capable of representing number itself or is only capable of encoding number based on other perceptual cues that are necessarily confounded with number, such as the total surface area or density of a dot array. In this talk, I will introduce a novel analytic method, which allows an assessment of the unique contributions of number and other visual properties. I will then describe the application of this approach to a series of passive-viewing event-related-potential studies in human adults that investigate the temporal dynamics of neural sensitivity to number and to other visual properties. The results demonstrate that the human brain is uniquely sensitive to number from very early in the visual stream, providing strong evidence for the existence of a neural mechanism for rapidly and directly extracting numerosity information in the human visual pathway. With the results from five-year-olds performing the same task, I will further discuss how such a neural mechanism may develop from young childhood to adulthood.

Kurland at Cognitive Brown Bag, Weds. 12/3 at noon

Jacquie Kurland of UMass Communication Disorders will be presenting in the Cognitive Brown Bag series in Tobin 521B at noon. Everyone is welcome. The abstract for her talk:

Evidence increasingly suggests that intensive language-action therapy, such as Constraint-Induced Language Therapy (CILT), can take advantage of the brain’s potential to overcome learned non-use, even in chronic moderate-to-severe aphasia. It is believed that CILT may bring about rapid improvements in naming by jumpstarting systems that have been deprived of opportunities for experience-dependent learning. However, many questions remain regarding which aspects of the treatment are most effective, why the treatment works for some but not others, and importantly, what the mechanisms are supporting language recovery in post-stroke aphasia. The current study examines changes in behavior and fMRI BOLD activation in 20 individuals with chronic aphasia who underwent two weeks of intensive language therapy ­ with or without constraint to speech.