Tina Liu

"The developing ventral visual pathway following right occipital and posterior temporal lobectomy"

Patterns of functional (re)organization in patients with hemispherectomy/lobectomy offer a unique opportunity to elucidate the extent of plasticity in cortex. In this talk, I will report the findings from our comprehensive, longitudinal case study of a child, UD, who underwent surgical removal of the entire right occipital and posterior temporal lobe at age 6y 9m, and surprisingly, showed both age-appropriate face/object recognition skills and normal intelligence before and after surgery. At multiple time points post-surgery, using fMRI, we observed stability but also plasticity in category-selective regions of cortex. Specifically, whereas selectivity for scenes and objects remained stable across all three imaging sessions, changes were most evidence in the developing/competing face network and adjacent visual word form area along the left ventral visual pathway. These findings reveal both extensive and compromised plasticity in category selectivity when confined to a single hemisphere, offering an unprecedented view of dynamic changes in the cognitive architecture of the brain.

Evan Pence

"Three Paradigms in Animal Cognition"

Animal cognition has been a perennial topic of interest in the history
of science, with discussions appearing early in antiquity and
continuing to the present day. Over time, however, opinions on the
extent of non-human animals’ cognitive capacities and the methods used to investigate such questions have varied widely. My research focusses on the comparatively recent period beginning in the mid-19th century and continuing into the early 20th. The purpose of this talk shall be to explore the development, within this and more recent times, of
three distinct methods in the history of animal cognition research:
the natural historical, behavioral, and neurophysiological.