Greg successfully upgrades from MPhil to PhD candidate!
Our Lab's first PhD student, Greg Cooper successfully upgraded from MPhil to PhD candidate last week! His work over the last year has been focused on new ways of characterising asynchronous relationships between activity in distant brain regions using fMRI, which he will later be applying to psychedelic neuroimaging data. See below for a brief description of his work:
Primary cortical regions receive global inputs over the longest delaysGreg Cooper, Sarah Aliko, Jeremy I Skipper1,*1Experimental Psychology, University College London, UK*Corresponding author: Greg Cooper; greg.cooper@ucl.ac.ukAbstract
Sensory processing in real-life environments requires the integration of information presented over multiple timescales, simultaneously. While previous studies have investigated the encoding of varying timescales across the cortex, it is not understood how or where temporally complex information is integrated into a coherent whole within the brain. Using a novel cross-correlational approach, we introduce a new measure of Delayed Global Functional Connectivity in order to investigate global, asynchronous functional connectivity architectures in the brain within a naturalistic, movie-fMRI paradigm. We reveal a tendency towards high delays in the order of up to one minute across functional connections into primary sensory and language regions. We demonstrate that these maps are stable across participants, and demonstrate accumulating increases in delay in early visual regions that accumulate across the time course of watched movies.