MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit

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Recent news

March 2012: Direct brain measures reveals how language and action interact in the brain

A new scientific collaboration between Argentinean and UK research teams including MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit researcher Dr Tristan Bekinschtein has led to a study which has uncovered what happens in the brain when language and actions interact, and could help in the diagnoses, prognosis and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson.

All participants in the study performed a task (the Action-Compatibility Effect task) where they have to respond with an open or closed hand to sentences that either matched the hand position or did not. For example "The show was praiseworthy so Hanna applauded" is a matching hand position, as we applaud with open hands.

Epilepsy patients receiving a surgical implantation of electrodes onto their brain to assess the source of their epilepsy were assessed using various action-language tests, and their brain activity was directly measured using the intracranial electrodes. Direct cortical recordings in the motor areas of the brain (parts of the brain playing a key role in movement intention and action) and the language areas of the brain showed activity at the same time, meaning there is a joint process in the brain for language processing and physical actions.

Similar tests were also performed by Parkinson Disease patients and it was found that these patients behave differently; they did not have the same action-compatibility effect, a result that implies these patients have a miscommunication between the language and the motor areas in the brain.

Both findings, the Parkinson patients' behaviour and the epilepsy patients' direct brain recordings, support the idea that language and action interact in the brain directly and influence each other. This information could help open up new avenues of research for epilepsy and Parkinson's Disease and help us understand more about how language and actions converge in our brain and what happens when this goes wrong.

The work was done as part of a collaboration between Argentinean research centres the Epilepsy Laboratory, IBCN, University of Buenos Aires, the Epilepsy Section, Ramos Mejía Hospital, the Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO) and the Medical Research Council (MRC). To read the full paper see here.

March 2012: New study on speech recognition and predictive coding

Following on from other work on the speed of spoken word recognition, an MEG study by Pierre Gagnepain, Rik Henson and Matt Davis shows how the brain achieves incredible speed and accuracy in recognising speech.

In a study published today in Current Biology, the researchers show that the brain is constantly using knowledge of familiar words to predict what speech sounds will be heard next. Matt Davis explains: "Many of us are familiar with using predictive texting on mobile phones – these systems try to guess what you want to say to save you the trouble of typing it. What we've shown is that the human brain uses a similar, but more sophisticated form of prediction in making sense of speech. The Superior Temporal Gyrus, a part of the brain involved in hearing, is constantly predicting what sounds will come next when listening to speech. So, having heard the syllable 'form…' rather than trying to guess whether the word is 'formal', 'formidable' or 'formula', the brain predicts which sounds would come next if each of these words were said. By predicting which sounds will be heard, the brain can respond to incoming speech extraordinarily quickly."

The picture, generated by Simon Strangeways, illustrates predictive coding as a neural mechanism that allows listeners to use knowledge of familiar words and their constituent sounds when understanding speech. Each speech sound is a star and familiar words are constellations. A human listener predicts future sounds when listening, so as to recognise the constellation ("formula") once the sequence of sounds ("formu...") uniquely identifies a single word.

More details on repdictive coding can be found here. Full details of the paper can be found here

March 2012: What we say and what we do

Moral ideals are strongly ingrained within society and individuals alike, but actual moral choices are profoundly influenced by tangible rewards and consequences. Using a paradigm which pits financial self-benefit at the expense of another's welfare, scientists from the CBSU led by Oriel Feldmanhall (left) show that real moral decisions can dramatically contradict moral choices made in hypothetical scenarios. Subjects were significantly more likely to inflict harm for monetary gain under real conditions than they were under hypothetical conditions. However, by systematically enhancing the contextual information available to subjects when addressing a hypothetical moral problem—thereby reducing the opportunity for mental simulation—we were able to incrementally bring subjects' responses in line with their moral behaviour in real situations. These results imply that previous work relying mainly on decontextualized hypothetical scenarios may not accurately reflect moral decisions in everyday life. The findings also shed light on contextual factors that can alter how moral decisions are made, such as the salience of a personal gain.

For more on this artcle see here

March 2012: Cambridge Neuroscience Seminar, March 20th 2012

The 24^th Cambridge Neuroscience Seminar, hosted by the Department of Pharmacology, will be held on Tuesday 20th March 2012, in the Babbage Lecture Theatre, Cambridge. This year, the theme is Translational Neuroscience with sessions covering obesity and appetite, pain, and sleep and circadian rhythms. An exciting line up of internal and external speakers has been confirmed. Plenary lectures will be given by Nobel laureate Dr Linda Buck (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle) and Dr Alexandra Dürr (Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, Paris). In addition, there will be a guest lecture from Professor Irene Tracey (Department of Clinical Neurology, University of Oxford). For full details see here.

March 2012: CBSU Science evening at CBSU

An entertaining and educational evening of demonstrations and lectures at the CBSU was held on Wednesday 14th March. Our annual science open evening this year titled "A window on the brain" was given as part of the Cambridge Science Festival and featured lectures from three of our leading scientists highlighting our varied research, plus the chance to take part in some of our experiments exploring how the mind and brain work, with time to meet the scientists and students doing the research. Hands on activities were run for the first hour, followed by three short talks. See here for a full programme of our talks. For more on the Cambridge Science Festival and the numerous events happening in Cambridge over the fortnight visit the CSF website.

March 2012: Word processing - faster than we thought

A recently published study by researchers at the CB

SU led by Lucy MacGregor (left) helps us understand more about the remarkable speed with which the brain can access neural representations of words - that is, memories of words encoded by the brain. Volunteers heard real words (such as "lake") intermixed with nonsense words ("lape") whilst their brain activity was recorded using MEG. Results showed that in as little as 50 ms after there was enough information in the speech signal to be able to identify the word (for example as "lake" rather than "late"), there was greater activation to the real words than to the nonsense words in the brain's temporal cortex. The finding suggests that our brains can access long-term memories of known words faster than previously believed, and helps our understanding of the basic processes involved in speech comprehension. Current work is using the paradigm to test the speed of speech analysis of patients who have impaired language function

to try and understand more about the nature of their deficit.

The paper can be read here - Nature Communications.