NIMH Workshop on Naturalistic Stimuli and Individual Differences

Talk Title: "Tracking changes in narrative responses across learning and development"

Chris Baldassano is currently an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at Columbia University. He was an undergraduate in Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, received his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University, and was a postdoc at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. His lab's research focuses on how knowledge about the world - including semantic knowledge, temporal structure, spatial maps, or schematic scripts - is used to understand and remember complex naturalistic experiences. By applying machine learning techniques to data from behavioral and neuroimaging experiments, his work aims to uncover how dynamic representations in the mind and brain during perception lead to the formation of event memories.

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Talk Title: "Similarity across neural diversity: Assessing the generalizability of individual brain models"

Elizabeth is a PhD candidate at McGill University working with Dr Jean-Baptise Poline. Her current research focuses on improving the inferences we can draw with high-dimensional, naturalistic datasets through tool and methods development. She is also actively involved in community initiatives to promote open and reproducible science within functional neuroimaging. 

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Talk Title: "Individual differences in resting-state fMRI"

I am a biomedical engineer (Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN) who uses fMRI to understand how the human brain works. My research has two main focuses: improving fMRI as a tool to study brain function, while also trying to understand what it is that the brain does when left to its own shenanigans (e.g., resting-state fMRI). More specifically, I am interested in fMRI denoising methods such as those based on multi-echo data, the development of real-time fMRI methods, understanding the different sources of variability in resting-state functional connectivity, and the relationship between free thought and the temporal dynamics of functional connectivity.

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Talk Title: "A geometric perspective on real-world learning and memory"

Jeremy Manning is an assistant professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College and directs the Contextual Dynamics Laboratory. His research is on understanding the brain network dynamics that support real-world learning and memory.  He holds BS degrees from Brandeis University in Computer Science and Neuroscience, and a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his postdoctoral training at Princeton University. Professor Manning is passionate about computational training and methods development. He leads development of several popular Python toolboxes including hypertools, supereeg, and timecorr, and is a contributor to several others. He Co-Directs the Methods in Neuroscience at Dartmouth Computational Summer School and teaches several open courses on data science and cognitive neuroscience.

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Talk Title: "Social Brain Development and Individual Differences: Insights from Naturalistic Imaging"

Elizabeth Redcay is an Associate Professor of Psychology and member of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) program at the University of Maryland where she directs the Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience lab (www.dscn.umd.edu). Her research examines the development and neural correlates of social interaction and social cognition in typically developing and autistic individuals using naturalistic imaging approaches.

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Talk Title: "Bigger needles, smaller haystacks: The use of movies in developmental fMRI research."

I am a child psychiatrist and investigator at the University of British Columbia where I run the Naturalistic Neuroimaging Lab. We use naturalistic conditions to study neural responses, with a focus on child psychiatric disorders.  The work includes producing and testing novel movie paradigms (e.g., Inscapes), developing methods that leverage the signal variability in movie-watching in unique ways and studying movie-watching as a brain state (www.headspacestudios.org). 

This talk will present new data on how movies can decrease noise and increase certain signal properties. I will also introduce a novel movie-based symptom provocation paradigm (called All Day Wrong) that we created to evoke symptoms in childhood-onset obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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