專題研討會 Symposium

Human brain activities involve complex interaction between neurons of various areas and hierarchies. Cross-frequency/area-coupling between EEG oscillations has been indicated to be critical to cognitive functions and mental illnesses, however, conventional analytic tools cannot fulfill the nonlinear and nonstationary characteristics of EEG signal. Research in this symposium section will report applications of the recently introduced Holo-Hilbert Spectral Analysis (HHSA, Huang et al., 2016) on EEG related to attention and working memory tasks, as well as the resting EEG of patients with Parkinson’s disease. With the adaptive, nonlinear analytic method, it is possible to entangle the complex EEG activations with high-dimensional representations in a more precise way. While EEG brings us correlational evidence, noninvasive brain stimulation provides causal evidence linking the brain and behavior. Speakers in the section will demonstrate how noninvasive brain stimulation helps to understand the perception formation, modulate memory performance, and ameliorate depression. 

Intersubject representational similarity analysis (IS-RSA) is a newly developed method to map intersubject similarity in behavioral measurements onto their similarity in neural responses. IS-RSA has been used in several distinct research fields, including decoding emotional experience, predicting political attitude from neural responses, and even linking trait anxiety with morphological similarity in white matter tract. In this symposium, we used this cutting-edge method in four distinct talks to demonstrate how to use this approach to map intersubject similarity across multiple domains. In the first talk, we used this method to examine the influence of pandemic lockdown on facial synchrony across individuals, especially their synchrony in fear facial synchrony. In the second talk, we used IS-RSA to map individual variations in emotional appraisal onto individual variations in their imaginative ability during pandemic lockdown. In the third talk, we found that individual variations in their state anxiety were mapped onto their intersubject emotional reactivity in the fusiform gyrus. In the last talk, we used IS-RSA to uncover individual variations in experiencing effortful self-control. We found that, in the effortful control group, similarity in beliefs of willpower was associated with similarity in brain dynamics in the fronto-parietal executive control network, whereas no such association was shown in the effortless control group. Across these four talks, we demonstrate how researchers could apply this cutting-edge IS-RSA method to get new insights about intersubject similarity across multiple domains.