The next Psychology Research Seminar will be on Wednesday 28th January 2015 at 3.30pm in F43. Refreshments will be available from 3.15pm.

Professor Rodrigo Quian Quiroga from The University of Leicester will be talking on concept cells.

Abstract: Concept cells

Intracranial recordings in patients suffering from intractable epilepsy allow studying the firing of multiple single neurons in awake and behaving human subjects. These studies have shown that neurons in the human medial temporal lobe represent concepts, responding in a remarkably selective, invariant and explicit manner to particular persons or objects, such as Jennifer Aniston, Luke Skywalker or the Sydney Opera House. I will show the main characteristic of these neurons and argue that they are the building blocks for declarative memory functions.

Biography:

Rodrigo Quian Quiroga holds a Research Chair at the University of Leicester. He is the director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience and the Head of Bioengineering at the University of Leicester. He graduated in
 Physics at the University of 
Buenos Aires, Argentina and
obtained his PhD in Applied
 Mathematics at the University of 
Luebeck, Germany. Before joining 
the University of Leicester in 
2004, he was a post-doctoral 
fellow at the Research Center
 Juelich, Germany, a Sloan 
fellow at the California Institute of Technology, USA and had short stays at RIKEN, Japan and the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He has held visiting positions at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, the University of California Los Angeles, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Buenos Aires, and CONICET. He obtained a young investigator award by the American Epilepsy Society, in 2010 a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and in 2014 he was selected as one of the 10 UK RISE Leaders in Science and Engineering.