Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts

HOW THE BRAIN DEALS WITH NOVELTY AND AMBIGUITY

Elkhonon Goldberg, Ph.D.
Clinical Professor of Neurology
NYU School of Medicine

The cortical network underlying a cognitive task is not static. Performance relies to a large extent on the prefrontal cortex and the right hemisphere while the task is novel and ambiguous, but increasingly on the posterior cortex and the left hemisphere as it becomes routinized and disambiguated. This dynamics is demonstrated with an “actor-centered” cognitive paradigm, which is particularly sensitive to normal frontal-lobe function when used as an activation task in neuroimaging, as well as to frontal-lobe dysfunction across a range of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Possible morphological basis for the functional novelty-routinization dynamics, and how it may lend itself to computational models, is considered.

Back to Top

The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study
Mail Stop 2A1, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030
Phone: (703) 993-4333 Fax: (703) 993-4325
Email: krasnow-webmaster@gmu.edu