Dr. Andreea Diaconescu will be visiting the Rotman Research Institute and leading a workshop on DCM (Dynamic Causal Modelling).  Please read below for more details about the workshop and RSVP to tbrown@rotman-baycrest.on.ca if you would like to attend. All are welcome!

Wednesday, Jan 4, 2012
1-3pm
Room 1050 Brain Health Complex

Workshop Outline:
Neuronally plausible forward models are essential for understanding how event-related potentials (ERPs) are generated.  Dynamic causal modelling (DCM) estimates effective connectivity or the influence one neuronal system has over another as a result of an experimentally-induced perturbation. DCM uses a biologically informed causal model to make inferences about the underlying neural mechanisms that generate the observed event-related responses.  This approach provides an important advancement over conventional source reconstruction techniques of ERP data because it places neurobiological constraints on the model inversion, in which the parameters of the reconstruction have a specific neuronal interpretation.
The parameters encode the coupling among neuronal assembles and how coupling depends upon stimulus attributes or experimental manipulations. In this workshop, I will give an overview of the models used to estimate the neural mechanisms that generate the event-related responses. I will show a practical example in which one could apply DCM, and, finally, I will give an overview of the SPM 8 interface that is currently used to analyze and model ERP data.