She accepted the Institute of Aging at the annual conference of the Canadian Association on Gerontology in Montreal. The prize, which augments major scholarship funding she has already received, included the money, an invitation to the conference and, best of all, a chance to adjudicate research posters.

“It’s perfect timing for me,” says the first-year doctoral student in the Faculty of Health's School of Kinesiology & Health Science. “I’ll be able to see what’s going on in my field. Winning this award has been very motivating."

Hawkins started work this fall developing and evaluating a clinical assessment tool to measure visuomotor integration (hand-eye coordination) that could lead to early detection of Alzheimer’s disease. For this, CIHR is funding her research to the tune of $35,000 a year – $30,000 in salary plus $5,000 research allowance – for each of the next three years. It’s the biggest scholarship Hawkins has ever received.

Left: Kara Hawkins

Sit down with Hawkins at her corner desk in the office she shares with other graduate students and you’ll notice only one image taped to the wall next to her computer. “That’s my brain,” says the 27-year-old of the vertical MRI scan taken this fall in 91ŃÇɫ’s new Neuroimaging Laboratory, located in the Sherman Health Science Research Centre.

The brain. Hawkins became fascinated with it early in her undergraduate years. "You can't understand behaviour without understanding the brain. That's what interested me most." She started studying psychology then branched into kinesiology. It was a natural detour. “I’m an athlete,” says the former varsity goalie who now plays forward for the Aurora Panthers and for the Ice-O-Topes, an intramural team at 91ŃÇÉ«. “I wanted to learn how the brain controls movement.”

After graduating in 2006, she jumped at an offer to work as a neuropsychology assistant at Baycrest, a centre specializing in geriatric research and care. “I’ve always been interested in clinical applications,” says Hawkins. Baycrest sparked an interest in aging and two years later she returned to 91ŃÇÉ« to pursue a master’s degree and neuroscience graduate diploma, delving deeper into the neurophysiology of complex motor control. She won three scholarships to do it and graduated last spring.

Now a doctoral student, she’s back in a clinical setting. At 91ŃÇÉ« Central Hospital, she is collaborating with the geriatric physician to diagnose aging patients who show signs of mental deterioration. Currently, doctors use language, cognition, memory and attention tests to score patients’ mental status out of 30. It’s an imprecise science, and Hawkins has developed and is testing a new measurement tool that could be more precise.

The tool looks like a laptop. There are two touch-sensitive screens, one vertical and the other horizontal (where the keyboard would normally be). The patient is instructed to reach for a target that appears on the vertical screen, at first directly with her hand and then more indirectly using the horizontal touch screen to manipulate a cursor. The test is not educationally or language biased, and Hawkins can determine which part of the brain the patient is using and the level of dysfunction based by the accuracy and speed of the response.

The brain is a complex network of communicating parts. When someone has dementia, the lines of communication deteriorate and misfire. Hawkins’ test aims to detect the breakdown in the visual-motor and cognitive-motor communication lines. “These touch-screen tracking tests tap into that.”

Hawkins is currently trying to recruit 60 to 90 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and the same number who are aging normally. Over the next three years, she’ll test her diagnostic tool. She is particularly interested in finding out if it can detect early and more subtle stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Interested participants may contact her at karah@yorku.ca.

The earlier we can catch signs of mental deterioration, the more time there will be for intervention that could delay the onset, says Hawkins. Earlier and more precise diagnosis could lead to better education and better care for patients, she says.

Hawkins, now a member of the , is doing her research under the supervision of  Prof. Lauren Sergio, an expert in hand-eye coordination and director of 91ŃÇɫ’s Sensorimotor Neuroscience Laboratory. When she’s finished her PhD, she hopes to continue exploring diseases associated with aging.

By Martha Tancock, YFile contributing writer

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91ŃÇÉ« is currently seeking an MRI technologist to work in the Neuroimaging Laboratory, located in the which officially opens this fall. The position will manage the laboratory's day-to-day operations and assist in the practical aspects of MRI scanning.

More details, including salary, deadlines and how to apply, are available in the job posting.

Please note that only resumes submitted through the described process will be considered.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer

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Schneider's appointment was announced by Walter Tholen, interim dean of 91ŃÇÉ«'s Faculty of Science & Engineering.

With a PhD in brain and cognitive science from the University of Rochester, Scheider brings to 91ŃÇÉ« a solid background in science and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). He has previously been involved in development of MRI centres at Princeton University, the University of Rochester and the University of Missouri. Schneider has also designed and taught MRI courses that include a laboratory component where graduate students learn to operate a fMRI scanner as well as design experiments and analyze the resulting data. He expects to offer this course at 91ŃÇÉ« shortly.

Right: Keith Schneider

A pioneer of fMRI studies of human brainstem visual structures, Schneider's  has been with the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and the superior colliculus, both which receive direct input from the retina via the optic nerve, has shown that both structures are involved in visual selective attention.

Schneider has also shown that the phenomenon of binocular rivalry occurs in human LGN, proving that previous theories of rivalry as a high-level cognitive phenomenon are incorrect. Rivalry occurs when each of the eyes views an entirely different stimulus (e.g. horizontal lines in the left eye & vertical lines in the right eye). The brain cannot combine these stimuli into a coherent picture of the world, so it defaults to an oscillation in which the subject perceives first one set of lines and then the other.

Schneider’s current work focuses on two major topics: tests of the M-cell theory of dyslexia, and development of enhanced fMRI data analysis algorithms. He is also working on new techniques to provide super-resolution during conventional fMRI scanning. During scanning, a subject’s head moves a small amount and this is unavoidable. This movement was previously regarded as an unfortunate source of noise. Schneider realized that these small movements can be used to provide subtly different perspective views of the brain and actually enhances resolution. Once development is completed, scientists will be among the first in the world to put super-resolution to work in studying major visual structures in the brain.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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91ŃÇÉ« psychology Professor Shayna Rosenbaum has been awarded a 2010 Sloan Research Fellowship, which she says will help take her work on episodic memory to a new level, not otherwise possible at this early stage in her career.

“The award provides me and my students with the flexibility to continue a line of research that might be considered to fall slightly beyond the boundaries of traditional memory research,” says Rosenbaum.

“The primary focus of my research has been on the nature and function of episodic memory and its relationship to other types of memory. It has implications for other aspects of cognition, such as future planning, decision-making and inferring other people’s mental experiences, that are not normally considered to be part of memory, and which I hope to study along with my students.”

Left: Shayna Rosenbaum

Rosenbaum studies three general types of memory – episodic, semantic and spatial – and how they relate to one another. Episodic memory, the ability to re-experience the details of personal life events, is the type Rosenbaum has focused on most recently, particularly how neural damage affects it. Semantic memory is knowledge about the world that is not tied to any one event, and spatial memory helps people find their way in any given environment.

Rosenbaum takes an innovative approach to memory research by combining neuroimaging methods, like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), with neuropsychological testing of patients who have damage to the medial temporal lobes and prefrontal cortex. In this way, she is able to investigate how memory for personal experiences and the experiences of other people are organized in the brain, how such representations break down following neurological disease and how other aspects of cognition are affected by their loss.

“It’s an examination of questions that are of interest to those studying neuroscience as well as evolutionary theory, human development, behavioural economics, clinical populations and general issues relating to human nature and consciousness,” says Rosenbaum.

She was one of 118 outstanding early career scientists, mathematicians and economists selected for a Sloan Research Fellowship by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The winners are faculty members at 56 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada who are conducting research at the frontiers of physics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics and neuroscience.

“The Sloan Research Fellowship is meaningful in that an international body of scientists, both within and outside the field of neuroscience, has recognized that research aiming to better understand memory and how it is organized in the brain might be both clinically and theoretically important,” says Rosenbaum, who teaches in 91ŃÇɫ’s Department of Psychology in the and the Neuroscience Graduate Diploma Program. She has also been an associate scientist at the at since 2005.

Her work is supported by the , the and a New Investigator Award from the .

The Sloan Research Fellowships have been awarded since 1955, initially in only three scientific fields – physics, chemistry and mathematics. Since then, 38 Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win the in their fields.

Grants of $50,000 for a two-year period are administered by each Fellow’s institution. Once chosen, Sloan Research Fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them and they are permitted to employ Fellowship funds in a wide variety of ways to further their research aims.

For more information, visit the Web site or 91ŃÇɫ’s Cognitive Neuroscience Lab Web site.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grant-making institution that supports original research and broad-based education in neuroscience, technology, engineering, mathematics and economic performance.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Playing video games for hours on end may prepare young Billy to become a laparoscopic surgeon one day, a study from 91ŃÇÉ« has shown.

The findings, published online in the journal , demonstrate that playing video games reorganizes the brain’s activity and can lead to better control of skilled movements. Alterations to the brain’s cortical network in young men who have significant experience playing video games gives them an advantage not only in playing the games, the study concludes, but in performing other dissociated visuomotor tasks.

The most common example of a dissociated visuomotor task – in which visual information received by the brain is dissociated from the required motor action – is using a mouse while focusing on a computer screen. A much more challenging dissociated visuomotor task would be performing laparoscopic surgery.

The study’s conclusion that using gaming skills can reorganize how the brain works also offers hope for future research into the problems experienced by patients with early Alzheimer’s disease, who struggle to complete the simplest visuomotor tasks.

Above: The study compared a group of avid video gamers with those who did not have the experience of playing. Using high-resolution brain imaging, researchers were able to test how skills learned from gaming can transfer to new tasks. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The study compared a group of 13 young men in their 20s, who had played video games at least four hours a week for the previous three years and were very proficient, to a group of 13 young men who did not have that experience. After some training, the subjects were placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and asked to do a series of increasingly difficult tasks, such as using a joystick or looking one way while reaching another way. The fMRI machine imaged cortical activity as their brains planned to do the tasks, so the results were not affected by any physical movement.

“By using high-resolution brain imaging (fMRI), we were able to actually measure which brain areas were activated at a given time during the experiment,” says Lauren Sergio (right), a professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Science in 91ŃÇɫ’s Faculty of Health.  “We tested how the skills learned from video game experience can transfer over to new tasks, rather than just looking at brain activity while the subject plays a video game.”

Sergio supervised the study by graduate student and lead author Joshua Granek (BSc. Spec. Hons. ’06, MSc. ’08), now a PhD student at 91ŃÇÉ«, and Diana Gorbet (MSc. ’02, PhD ’06), a PhD student at the time. All work in 91ŃÇɫ’s .

The parietal cortex is the part of the brain that a person typically relies on most in complex eye-hand tasks to translate what he or she sees into an action, with less reliance on the prefrontal cortex. The study found that in experienced video gamers’ brains, there is increased activity in the prefrontal cortex.

“We had noticed differences in brain activity between two gamers and other subjects in an earlier pilot study. We decided to do a study with an fMRI because we were curious about the differences in brain activity between skilled gamers and people with much less experience,” says Granek. “The video gamers exhibited increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is at the very front of the brain. While performing the same task, the less-experienced players – the people in the control group – used predominantly the parietal cortex, farther back.”

In the future, it would be interesting to study if the brain pattern changes are affected by the type of video games a player has used and the actual total number of hours he has played, Granek says, and to study female video gamers, whose brain patterns in earlier studies were different than those of males.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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