Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

This is a request for equipment that permits researchers to create temporary 'virtual' lesions in specific brain regions of volunteers while those volunteers are performing behavioural tasks. The technique is called transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS for short. By temporarily interfering with the function of a particular brain region, TMS allows researchers to determine the function of brain circuits in that region. When used properly, TMS poses no significant risk to humans. Researchers at the Centre for Brain and Mind at the University of Western Ontario will use TMS in conjunction with brain imaging (functional MRI or fMRI) to answer a number of central questions in cognitive neuroscience. How does our brain convert sensory information about the world into skilled goal-directed actions? How does our brain decode speech signals into meaningful communication? How do our emotions affect our performance on demanding tasks - and what brain areas are involved in this regulation? How does our brain enable us to recognize and remember people? How does our brain make sense of all the different kinds of objects and events we encounter every day? In other words, how do we learn to sort things into meaningful categories? In addition, physicists working closely with researchers in the Centre are striving to improve TMS - and make it compatible with the brain scanners that researchers use to study the activity of the brain.