心理语言学线上论坛 | 12月1日16:00 Siddharth Ramanan 博士讲座

Speaker: Siddharth Ramanan

Title: Parietal lobe contributions to episodic memory dysfunction: insights from neurodegenerative syndromes

Time: 16:00 – 17:30 pm, 1 December 2021 

           (Beijing, Hong Kong time)

Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638

            https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638

Parietal lobe contributions to episodic memory dysfunction: insights from neurodegenerative syndromes

Siddharth Ramanan, PhD

MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Units, University of Cambridge, UK

A distributed brain network supports our ability to remember past events. The parietal cortex is a critical member of this network, yet, its exact contributions to episodic remembering remain unclear. Neurodegenerative syndromes affecting the posterior neocortex offer a unique opportunity to understand the importance and role of parietal regions to episodic memory. In this talk, I introduce and explore the rare neurodegenerative syndrome of Logopenic Progressive Aphasia (LPA), an aphasic variant of Alzheimer’s disease presenting with early, left-lateralized temporoparietal atrophy amidst relatively spared hippocampal integrity. I then discuss two key studies from my recent work showcasing pervasive episodic and autobiographical memory dysfunction in LPA, to a level comparable to typical, amnesic Alzheimer’s disease. Using multimodal neuroimaging, I demonstrate how degeneration of the angular gyrus in the left inferior parietal lobule, and its structural connections to the hippocampus, contribute to amnesic profiles in this syndrome. I finally evaluate these findings in the context of memory profiles in other posterior cortical neurodegenerative syndromes as well as recent theoretical models underscoring the importance of the parietal cortex in the integration and representation of episodic contextual information.

About the Speaker

Dr Ramanan is a neuropsychologist investigating the neural contributors of heterogeneous cognitive and behavioural symptoms in neurodegenerative dementia syndromes. He completed his PhD in 2020 from The University of Sydney, Australia where he worked with Profs. Muireann Irish and Olivier Piguet at Frontier, a world-leading young-onset dementia research team. His work mainly focused on decomposing episodic memory and associated structural brain correlates in traditionally non-amnesic neurodegenerative disorders.

He moved to Cambridge to work with Prof. Matthew A. Lambon Ralph. He expands his research by adopting data-driven, transdiagnostic approaches to chart neurocomputational processes in the brain and to uncover new cognitive roles of brain regions. He has been awarded the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) Post-Doctoral Research Award, a distinction that recognizes the best research to be presented at the future INS Annual Meeting.

Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum:

https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html