Research overview

I. Introduction and overview of research plans Our research aim is to use biological, behavioral and computational methods to understand how the mind, brain and behavior are interrelated. Studying humans and animals, our research will link key cognitive and emotional functions to neural activities at multiple levels of brain systems. To establish these linkages, we set forth a research strategy, named 'SLBM (Strategy of Linking Brain and Mind)', the major steps and components of which are summarized in the following three sections. Target mechanisms A Brain B Mind Synaptic plasticity     Calcium sensors Perirhinal cortex Entorhinal cortex Auditory cortex Somatosensory cortex Parietal cortex Prefrontal cortex Hippocampus Amygdala Visual cortex Anterior cingulatu cortex Basal ganglia Superior temporal cortex Long-range cortical circuitry Orbitofrontal cortex Ventromedial frontal cortex Corpus callosum Episodic Memory Contextual Memory Place Memory Association Memory Working Memory Emotion Pain and Pleasure Attention Anxiety Motion and form perception Perceptual organization Decision making Multistable perception Adaptation Cross-modal sensory integration Social interaction Measurements C Neurometric D Psychometric Transgenic animals     Protein-protein interaction Patch-clamp recording In vitro electrophysiology in vivo electrophysiology Two-photon imaging Multi-unit parallel recording Chronic eletrophysiology Lesion/inactivation study (F)MRI/DTI/PET/MEG Classification of cortical activity Functional connectivity analysis Transcranial magnetic stim Brain Segmentation Near-Infrared Optical Imaging Tractography Maze learning tasks   Fear conditioning Anxiety and depression test Test of genetic mutant mice Behavioral genetics Bistable perception task Signal detection task 2-alternative force choice task Motion discrimination task Reverse correlation Biological motion task Visual search task Eye movements Face recognition task Neuropsychological testing Theory-of-Mind task Social cue Perception task Imitation task E Brain/Mind, Simulated F Abnormal Brain/Mind Neural modeling of dynamic vs resting state network/ Hippocampal network of memory/Propagation of cortical excitability/Motion perception/Oscillations in brain or percept/Cortical hippocampal interaction Neurocognitive deficits in Schizophrenia/Depression/Amnesia/Autism/ Alzheimer's Disease/Epilepsy/Synesthesia/Phantom pain/ Anxiety/Fragile X disease Protein to Cognition unit System & Cognitive unit Clinical & Computational unit Figure 1. Structure of SLBM