Breakfast & Science Seminar 29

Abstract

The notion that multisensory processes impact perception and behaviour in early cerebral stages has been extensively demonstrated during the past decades. The introduction of ultra-high field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and novel biologically-inspired data analysis methods allowed the exploration of these mechanisms across different scales in living humans. fMRI measures the entire brain simultaneously and reveals several new multisensory activation patterns showing the integration of information from different senses in regions usually denoted as unisensory in nature. In particular, in recent years, thanks to the high sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio offered by fMRI scanning, we were able to employ and develop both high sensitivity, high spatial resolution measurements on the one hand and fast temporal resolution fMRI techniques on the other. This talk will overview how we have capitalized on these advances to improve our knowledge on the neurobiological mechanisms supporting multisensory processes. Specifically, I will focus on the following: 1) Establishing the vascular dynamics of motion processing in visual cortex with sub-sec 4T and 7T fMRI at the millimeter scale 2) Quantifying the spatial profile of neural activity in visual cortex during the perception of visual, auditory, and tactile motion 3) Decoding of multisensory responses during visual completion using 7T fMRI. All measurements have taken advantage of the latest advanced analysis techniques such as multivoxel pattern analysis MVPA, population receptive field mapping and BOLD deconvolution.

About the speaker

Dr. Anna Gaglianese is a Marie Curie fellow at the Department of Radiology in CHUV-UNIL in Lausanne. Her ultimate goal is to combine high resolution imaging of cortical networks in vivo with advanced modelling techniques to probe our understanding of visual and multisensory processing in both the healthy and the pathological brain. She was awarded a Marie Curie Sklodowska fellowship to investigate the functional architecture of the multisensory motion system using 7T fMRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation in 2021.
She received her master degree in Biomedical Engineering and her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Pisa in 2009 and 2013. She then moved to The Netherlands in 2013 where she was a postdoctoral researcher in the 7T group in the University Medical Center of Utrecht before moving to Lausanne in 2019.

10:00-10:30  CIBM news and networking