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Functional MRI, or fMRI, allows us to observe brain
activity in people. The fMRI scanner actually measures changes in blood
flow, volume, and oxygenation, all of which are related to neural activity.
The exact mechanisms which connect the neural activity to the blood response
or BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) response, is currently not well
understood. fMRI has, however, proven to be an extremely valuable tool in
understanding the functioning of the brain.
Computers that analyze the data from the scanner gives us
nice color pictures like the examples shown here. The colors do not usually
represent absolute activation, rather they show changes in neural activity
from one condition to the next. Because of the massive amounts of data in
one dataset, and problems such as anatomical variability, the statistics
involved in analyzing these data are complicated and still under scrutiny.
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We have found the hippocampal areas illustrated above to be involved in relational processing, while the parahippocampal and frontal areas to be more involved during recall |
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Activation during the learning of contextual pairs within the hippocampus
Bilateral activations associated with contextual facilitation on a search task. These areas lie in the anterior hippocampus |
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We are currently working with fMRI in collaboration with the
Medical College of Wisconsin. We use the 1.5T (a measure of magnetic field
size) scanner at the Froedtert Medical Pavilion for our studies. Our studies
try to assess the involvement of brain structures (primarily the hippocampus)
in certain memory tasks
Soon we will be starting experiments on a 3T, which will give us better resolution and allow
us to try new paradigms that we couldn't on a 1.5T. We are also interested in trying different
analyses like PLS and hippocampal unfolding.
To learn more about our new projects, check out our other pages
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