ICON 2014
 


Supported By
Professor Michael C. Corballis
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Professor Michael Corballis is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Auckland and honorary Doctorate LLD of the University of Waterloo, Ontario. He has been awarded the Office of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to psychological science, and is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, the Association of Psychological Scientists, and the Royal Society of New Zealand. Professor Corballis has published over 200 articles and over 60 book chapters in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, on such topics as visual cognition, memory, language, brain asymmetry, and human evolution. He has authored several books: his most recent are The Recursive Mind (Princeton University Press, 2011), Pieces of Mind (Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2012), and The Wandering Mind (Auckland University Press, 2013).



Professor Stanislas Dehaene

Collège de France, Paris, France

Professor Stanislas Dehaene is Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at Collège de France and Director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit. He has authored over 100 scientific publications in major international journals, as well as acclaimed books (including The Number Sense, which has been translated in eight languages), and has received international prizes including the McDonnell Centennial Fellowship and the Louis D prize of the French Academy of Sciences. Professor Dehaene’s research interests concern the cerebral bases of specifically human cognitive functions such as language, calculation, and reasoning. His main scientific contributions include the study of the organization of the cerebral system for number processing. He was also the first to demonstrate that subliminal presentations of words can yield detectable cortical activations in fMRI, and has used these data to support an original theory of conscious and nonconscious processing in the human brain.

 

Supported By:



Professor Birte Forstmann

University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Professor Birte Forstmann is Professor of Cognitive Neurosciences at the Cognitive Science Centre, University of Amsterdam, and tenured research fellow of the European Research Council. She completed her PhD in 2006 at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. Professor Forstmann’s general research goal is to understand the brain mechanisms that allow people to adapt quickly to changes in their environment. Her work is motivated by a single strong conviction that behavioral data and brain measurements need to make contact with psychological theory via concrete mathematical models of latent cognitive processes, and combines mathematical modeling with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), ultra-high resolution 7T MRI, and electroencephalography (EEG).

 


Supported By:



Professor Heidi Johansen-Berg

University of Oxford, UK

Professor Heidi Johansen-Berg is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Wellcome Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain (FMRIB), Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. She heads the Plasticity Group, a multi-disciplinary team of scientists with an interest in how the brain changes with learning, experience or recovery of function following damage.  Professor Johansen-Berg’s group use a variety of neuroimaging and brain stimulation approaches to study plasticity, predominantly in the motor system. As well as shedding light on how the healthy brain resopnds to change, her work also has implications for understanding and treating disease, testing new methods for rehabiltiation after stroke, and assessing whether taking up exercise could slow the effects of age on the brain.


 
Supported By:



Professor Jason Mattingley

University of Queensland, Australia
Professor Jason Mattingley is Foundation Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Queensland Brain Institute and School of Psychology, University of Queensland. He is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, has been awarded the Australian Psychological Society’s Distinguished Contribution to Psychological Science Award, and is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Professor Mattingley’s research is directed at understanding the neural and cognitive mechanisms that underlie selective attention in health and disease, with a particular focus on how attentional processes influence multisensory integration, motor planning, neural plasticity and consciousness. He has published extensively in high impact journals including Science, Nature, Neuron, Current Biology and Nature Neuroscience.

 


P
rofessor Pat Michie
University of Newcastle, Australia

Professor Pat Michie is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and co-director of the Schizophrenia Program of the Priority Research Centre in Translational Neuroscience and Mental Health at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and Chair of the National Committee of Brain and Mind of the Australian Academy of Science. Professor Michie’s primary research area is cognitive neuroscience, particularly the neural basis of auditory information processing, attention and executive functions in healthy individuals, in people with schizophrenia and those at risk of psychosis. Her research using mismatch negativity (MMN) provided the first evidence for MMN as a potential early marker for schizophrenia and is currently focussed on animal models of schizophrenia using MMN as an endophenotype. She has also published extensively on auditory and visual selection attention, stop-signal inhibition and task-switching.


 
Supported by:


Professor Russell A Poldrack
University of Texas, USA


Professor Russ Poldrack is Professor of Psychology and Neurobiology and Director of the Research Imaging Centre, University of Texas at Austin, USA. He has held previous academic positions at Harvard Medical School and UCLA, and has received early career achievement awards from the American Psychological Association and the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. Professor Poldrack’s research uses neuroimaging to examine the brain systems involved in learning and memory, executive control, and decision making, centered around the questions of how new skills are acquired, how existing skills are expressed, and how people exert executive control during thought and behavior. His research is strongly focused on translation of basic cognitive neuroscience into the clinical domain, with collaborations on studies of schizophrenia, ADHD, Tourette Syndrome, and drug addiction.

 


Supported by:


Professor Olaf Sporns

Indiana University, USA


Professor Olaf Sporns is Provost Professor and Director of the Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience Group in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, USA. He has been awarded Junior Faculty and Distinguished Faculty Awards from Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences, and was recently awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Professor Sporns’ research area is theoretical and computational neuroscience, with an emphasis on complex systems, brain connectivity, and neurorobotics. Over his career, Professor Sporns has authored 150 peer-reviewed publications as well as the recent books Networks of the Brain and Discovering the Human Connectome, both published by MIT Press.

 


Supported By


Professor Daniel Wolpert

University of Cambridge, UK

Professor Daniel Wolpert is Professor of Engineering in Computational and Biological Learning and Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator, University of Cambridge, UK. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, he was awarded the Minerva Foundation Golden Brain Award, and has recently been appointed to a Royal Society Research Professorship in Neurobiology. Professor Wolpert’s research interests are computational and experimental approaches to human sensorimotor control. His research uses engineering approaches to understand how the human brain controls movement, including both computational modelling and experimental approaches using robotic and virtual reality interfaces. Research areas include motor planning and optimal control, probabilistic (Bayesian) models, motor predictive and modular approaches to motor learning




ACNS Young Investigator Lecture
 
 


Alex Fornito

Deputy Director, Monash Clinical & Imaging Neuroscience, Monash University

Alex is currently Associate Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences and Deputy Director of Monash Clinical and Imaging Neuroscience at Monash University, Australia. His work focuses on the integration of complex network science, behavioural and molecular genetics, and neuroimaging data to understand brain structure and function in healthy and psychiatric populations.