ACNS 2012

Conference Information

The 3rd Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference was hosted at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, November 29 – December 2, 2012.

This annual meeting brings together researchers from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience areas, all with a focus on relationships between the brain, mind, and behaviour. We encourage poster and oral presentations from any area of cognitive neuroscience.

Disciplines

• Psychology
• Psychiatry
• Neuropsychology
• Neuroscience
• Neuroimaging
• Physiology
• Bioengineering

Topic Areas

• Attention
• Emotion and Social
• Executive Processes
• Language
• Memory
• Motor
• Sensation & Perception

Methodologies

• fMRI/MRI/DTI
• Electroencephalography
• Magnetoencephalography
• TMS
• Human brain lesion studies
• Psychophysics
• Psychophysiology

International Invited Speakers

• Professor Kia Nobre, Oxford University, UK
• Professor Christian Keysers, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience
• Dr John Serences, University of California, San Diego, USA
• Professor Sohee Park, Vanderbilt University, USA
• Dr Valeria Gazzola, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience
• Professor Kevin Pelphrey, Yale University, USA

Click here for details of Keynote Speakers and Symposia

• Ross Cunnington, Chair
• Sakinah Alhadad
• Jeff Bednark
• Megan Campbell
• Luca Cocchi
• Merryn Constable

• Harriet Dempsey-Jones
• Paul Dux
• Natasha Matthews
• Jason Mattingley
• Martin Sale
• Chase Sherwell

For more information contact

A/Prof Ross Cunnington,
University of Queensland

r.cunnington@uq.edu.au

John Serences is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Work in his lab employs converging methods including computational modeling, psychophysics, fMRI and EEG to study how attentional factors influence perceptual processing, working memory and decision making. Serences did his undergraduate work at the University of California, San Diego under the guidance of Dr. Harold Pashler, his graduate work at Johns Hopkins University with Dr. Steven Yantis, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Salk Institute with Dr. Geoffrey Boynton. He was a faculty member in the department of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine for 1.5 years before moving back to UCSD in 2008. Work in his lab is generously funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health and a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award.

Professor Christian Keysers studied Biology and Psychology in Germany (University of Konstanz) and Boston (MIT, Harvard) and made his PhD in St Andrews with David Perrett on the neural basis of facial perception. In 2000, he moved to Parma, Italy where he worked with Giacomo Rizzolatti in the laboratory where mirror neurons were discovered. He contributed to the discovery of auditory mirror neurons in primates and showed that the idea of mirror neurons also applies to our emotions and sensations using fMRI in humans. He then moved to Groningen, the Netherlands, where he became a full professor for the social brain in 2008. In 2010, he moved to Amsterdam to become a department head at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, a research institute of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work has been published in leading journals, including Science, Neuron, Trends in Cognitive Sciences and Current Biology. He is the author of the award winning book “The Empathic Brain” (empathicbrain.com) that explains how the science of mirror neurons has changed our understanding of human nature and psychiatric disorders.

Anna Christina (known as Kia) Nobre is a cognitive neuroscientist interested in understanding the principles of the neural systems that support cognitive functions in the human brain. Her current research investigates how neural activity linked to perception and cognition is dynamically modulated according to memories, task goals, and expectations. She is also interested in understanding how these fine and large-scale regulatory mechanisms develop, and how they are disturbed in disorders of mental health. Her work integrates behavioural methods with a powerful combination of non-invasive techniques to image and stimulate the human brain. Kia obtained her PhD from Yale University. She moved to Oxford in 1994 where she is now Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow of Psychology at New College. Kia directs the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, a state-of-the-art facility for scientists investigating the neural dynamics that underpin human cognition and the neural deficits in psychiatric and neurological disorders, and heads the Brain & Cognition Lab, in the Department of Experimental Psychology.