Friday, October 31, 2003

12 noon

Redwood Neuroscience Institute

 

Title:  "Functional implications of primate cortical connectivity"

 

Rolf Kötter

C. &. O. Vogt Brain Research Institute in Düsseldorf, Germany

 

Abstract:

Progress in neuroinformatics has allowed us to create the largest and most detailed collation of anatomical connectivity data of the primate brain (see www.cocomac.org). Using advanced graph theoretic methods we can now extract connectivity matrices for various user-defined cortical partitioning schemes. From here we have started to characterize the connectional organization of the cerebral cortex and to look for correspondences with functionally relevant data, such as the distribution of neurotransmitter receptors, or the spatial and temporal spread of activity. New tools are being developed to address the biggest and most interesting challenge for connectivity-based analyses: to characterize and explain the distributed and cooperative processes that occur during cognition.