Roser Sala

Professor Lector, Unitat de Biofísica i Bioenginyeria, Departament de Biomedicina, Facultat de Medicina i Ciències de la Salut

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El proper dimecres 28 de Setembre, a les 12:30h a l’aula 3 de la Facultat de Farmacia el Prof. Beas-Zarate del Centro Universitario de Ciencias Biológicas y Agropecuarias, Rector de la Universidad de Guadalajarafarà una xerrada titulada “Posibilidades de colaboración en investigación y docencia entre la Universidad e Barcelona y la Universidad de Guadalajara (Mexico)”.

Josep Marco

Brainvitge- Learning from Reward - Universitat de Barcelona

Good vibrations: brain oscillatory activity associated with reward and prediction error processing

In our daily life we are constantly adapting our behaviour on the basis of the results of our action. We need, therefore, complex mechanisms which allow us to create expectancies about our actions and to evaluate them on the bases of the real outcomes. In this talk we will present two neural oscillatory mechanisms underlying the processing of rewards, punishments and prediction errors and we will consider different accounts on their functional significance.

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Karl Gegenfurtner

Department of Psychology - Giessen University

The Interaction Between Vision and Eye Movements

The existence of a central fovea, the small retinal region with high analytical performance, is arguably the most prominent design feature of the primate visual system. This centralization comes along with the corresponding capability to move the eyes to reposition the fovea continuously. Past research on visual perception was mainly concerned with foveal vision while the observers kept their eyes stationary. Research on the role of eye movements in visual perception emphasized their negative aspects, for example, the active suppression of vision before and during the execution of saccades. But is the only benefit of our precise eye movement system to provide high acuity of the small foveal region, at the cost of retinal blur during their execution? In this review, I will compare human visual perception with and without saccadic and smooth pursuit eye movements to emphasize different aspects and functions of eye movements. I will show that the interaction between eye movements and visual perception is optimized for the active sampling of information across the visual field and for the calibration of different parts of the visual field. The movements of our eyes and visual information uptake are intricately intertwined. The two processes interact to enable an optimal perception of the world, one that we cannot fully grasp by doing experiments where observers are fixating a small spot on a display.

Karl Gegenfurtner

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Objectius: Al final del curs, els participants inscrits tindran coneixements bàsics de les tècniques optogenètiques i quimiogenètiques, de possibles aplicacions experimentals i clíniques així com del disseny primari d’experiments per al mapeig de circuits neuronals.

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Patrick Haggard

Action and Body Research Group, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience

University College London

New approaches to volition

We feel we decide for ourselves what to do.  We also feel that our decisions and intentions lead to our physical actions. Indeed, our culture and society seem to be built upon a concept of individuals as autonomous, conscious, responsible agents. However, neuroscience has often struggled with the idea of voluntary action.  One key problem for mechanistic accounts of volition arises in trying to define the origin of voluntary actions in the brain.  Second, few neuroscientific accounts have captured the "sense of agency" that characteristically accompanies human goal-directed action.  I will report recent experimental work tackling both of these problems.  I hope to show that intentional action is a neural mechanism in the human brain, and that it can be studied experimentally.

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Iria SanMiguel

Brainlab, Predictive Processes in Motor-Sensory Interactions - Universitat de Barcelona

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