TORONTO, August 27, 2010 -- A York University psychologist researching how brain-injured Vietnam and Iraq war veterans reason and process emotion will speak at an upcoming conference on brain informatics and intelligent information technology taking place at York University August 28-30, 2010.
The Brain Informatics – BI 2010 International Conference, chaired by York professor Jimmy Huang, will feature talks by more than a dozen academics, including York professor Vinod Goel, whose research delves into the cognitive, computational, and neural basis of logical reasoning and emotional processing.
Goel, Professor of Psychology, Faculty of Health, is investigating how emotions can disrupt logical decision-making, using MRI scanning techniques and studies of American war veterans who have sustained localized damage to parts of their brains involved in these processes.
By studying changes in the brains of these patients and by comparing their behaviour to that of “normal” individuals, Goel and his colleagues are unravelling what happens when we reason, and why. They’re zooming in on an area of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex, which researchers believe is responsible for higher-level cognitive tasks.
Studies conducted by Goel and colleagues typically involve asking subjects to reason with both neutral statements and statements calculated to be upsetting or emotionally-charged; they then look at resulting changes in brain activity and how this switching between neutral and emotional material alters neural circuitry.
To date, they have observed that emotionally-charged items are routed towards an area of the brain called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, while neutral material typically activates the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In studying war veterans, Goel is finding that those with injuries to the ventral medial prefrontal cortex can reason about neutral items but cannot sort out information that is emotionally-charged.
“These are the kinds of people who appear to be functioning normally in the laboratory, but they encounter problems with real-world situations, often due to an inability to process uncertain or emotionally-charged inputs,” he says.
Goel’s research aims to find better treatment options for these patients.
“Most of the current therapies focus around memory and attentional mechanisms,” says Goel. “However, as we improve our understanding of the prefrontal cortex and its role in decision-making, it is becoming clearer that not everything is a memory or attentional issue. If we can get a better idea of the kinds of deficits these patients are coping with, clinicians may be able to devise interventions that are more beneficial,” he says.
Professor Goel’s research has been funded by a McDonnell-Pew Award, Premier’s Research Excellence Award, and grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). His co-researcher, Professor Jordan Grafman, is a senior investigator in the Cognitive Neuroscience Section of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The BI 2010 International Conference is sponsored by the Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC) and the IEEE Task Force on Brain Informatics (IEEE TF-BI). For more information including a list of speakers, visit: http://www.yorku.ca/amtbi10/amtbi.php?conf=bi&here=news .
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Melissa Hughes, Media Relations, York University, 416 736 2100 x22097, mehughes@yorku.ca
