Hervé Abdi
dates de séjour
discipline
Fonction d’origine
Institution d’origine
pays d'origine
projet de recherche
Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory
Our project is to develop and extend recent work by a French team part of the Equipex MATRICE (lead by D. Peschanski, CNRS/Université de Paris I). This team performed a sophisticated meta-analysis of very large sets of brain imaging studies and synthesized their results by showing that the cortex was organized in two well defined anatomic functional networks called rings.
The first ring, called the Visual-Sensori-Motor ring, (VSA ring) comprises brain regions involved in immediate high speed information processing. The second ring, called the Parieto-Temporal-Frontal ring, comprises brain regions involved in more deliberative processing such as memory, emotions, and biological rhythms. These two rings implement two different temporal integration scales but communicate via a set of common regions.
In this project we plan to develop and extend this pioneering work by integrating information from different databases that we will allow us to relate anatomico-functional data with their genetic counterparts and their cognitive and psychological expression. To do so, I will collaborate with the MATRICE team and integrate my expertise as a cognitive neuroscientist and data analysist (specialized in brain imaging) with their expertise as neuroscientists and bio-informaticians. In this project we would integrate genetic information on gene expression.
In addition to deepening our current understanding of the brain architecture, our methodology is likely to have broad clinical applications implied by a better comprehension of degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer dementia or multiple sclerosis because these diseases seem to follow the dissociation expressed by the rings (e.g., the regions concerned by Alzheimer dementia correspond closely to the PTF ring, whereas multiple sclerosis target mostly the VSA ring). Also, as indicated before, normal aging seems to affect differentially some components of the PTF ring and therefore deepening our fundamental knowledge of the functional and anatomical underpinning of these brain structure is likely to rapidly transfer to these crucial clinical and societal issues.
biographie
Hervé Abdi was born in France where he grew up. He received an M.S. in Psychology from the University of Franche-Comté (France) in 1975, an M.S. (D.E.A.) in Economics from the University of Clermond-Ferrand (France) in 1976, an M.S. (D.E.A.) in Neurology from the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg (France) in 1977, and a Ph.D. in Mathematical Psychology from the University of Aix-en-Provence (France) in 1980. He was an assistant professor in the University of Franche-Comté (France) in 1979, an associate professor in the University of Bourgogne at Dijon (France) in 1983, a full professor in the University of Bourgogne at Dijon (France) in 1988. He is currently a full professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas and an adjunct professor of radiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He was twice a Fulbright scholar. He has been also a visiting scientist or professor in the Rotman Institute (Toronto University, Canada), the "Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers" (Paris, France), Brown University, and in the Universities of Chuo (Japan), Dijon (France), Geneva (Switzerland), Nice Sophia Antipolis (France), La Sorbonne (Paris, France), and Paris 13 (France). His recent work is concerned with face and person perception, odor perception, and with computational modeling of these processes. He is also developing statistical techniques to analyze the structure of large data sets as found, for example, in Genomics, brain imaging, and sensory evaluation (e.g., principal component analysis, correspondence analysis, PLS-Regression, STATIS, DISTATIS, discriminant correspondence analysis, multiple factor analysis, multi-table analysis, additive tree representations,...). In the past decade, he has published over 80 papers (plus 5 books and 3 edited volumes) on these topics. He teaches or has taught classes in cognition, computational modeling, experimental design, multivariate statistics, and the analysis of brain imaging data.
