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Over the years the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience(ICN) has been the home of numerous innovative andingenious researchers and academics. It was the firstresearch facility of its kind in Europe and has spawnedcountless clones. The Institute continues to be a worldleader: it has had at least one publication in Nature orScience every year and, two years ago, witnessed one ofits founding members, in John O’Keefe, receive a NobelPrize.

Today's event aims to give you a chance to see throughthe looking-glass into the mad world of cognitiveneuroscience and the discoveries that are being madeevery day at the ‘ICN’. With so much being achieved in thelast twenty years, the event will close by asking what wecan expect from the field in the next twenty.

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WELCOME

10.00 Tim Shallice Keynote: An autobiography of the ICN10.20 Leun Otten How we lay down new memories10.40 Oli Robinson Anxiety in the brain: adventures with a shock machine11.00 Lucy Foulkes Social reward in healthy and clinical populations 11.30-12.00: coffee break

12.00 Val Curran Cannabis - madness and medicine?12.20 Camilla Nord Why psychiatry needs neuroscience: the search for new depression treatments12.40 Robb Rutledge Predicting happiness13.00 Sarah White Autism: are you thinking what I think I'm thinking you are thinking?

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PROGRAMME

13.30-14.30: lunch break

14.30 Katerina Fotopoulou The embodied mind14.50 Steve DiCosta From sensory cues to a sense of agency15.10 Jo Hale Humans versus avatars in the future of social mimicry15.30 Bahador Bahrami "Take my advice. It will be good for me" : the neuroscience of persuading others

16.00-16.10: mini break

16.10 Martin Eimer Nima Khalighinejad Anna Kuppuswamy Geraint Rees Panel discussion How will cognitive neuroscience affect our lives in the next 20 years?

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PROGRAMME

10.00 TIM SHALLICE

Keynote: an autobiographyof the ICN

Timothy Shallice is a professor of neuropsychology andthe first director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience(ICN). He has been a professor of Cognitive Neurosciencesince 1994 and was influential in laying the foundationsfor the discipline of cognitive neuropsychology, byformalising many of its methods and assumptions in thebook From Neuropsychology to Mental Structure. He hasalso worked on many core problems in cognitivepsychology and neuropsychology, including executivefunction, language and memory. Together withpsychologist Donald Norman, Shallice proposed aframework of attentional control of executive functioning.Tim’s talk will present a history of the ICN and the peoplethat made the institute what it is today.

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10.20 LEUN OTTEN

How we lay down newmemories

Leun Otten is a Senior Lecturer in the UCL Division ofPsychology and Language Sciences who joined theInstitute of Cognitive Neuroscience in 1999. She leads aresearch group on human memory and the brain, andmakes widespread contributions to educational excellenceat the Institute. Leun’s research group investigates why weremember some things but forget others. There is growingevidence that for memory to be effective, the brain needsto be in the right state when new information isencountered. In her talk, Leun will detail how science caninvestigate the creation of new memories, and willdemonstrate this via the recording of electrical brainactivity. She will explain what we currently know about theinfluence of brain states on everyday and specialmemories, in people of varying ages. She will also give asneak preview about how this research may help peoplelearn more, and forget less, in future.

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10.40 OLIVER ROBINSON

Anxiety in the brain:adventures with a shockmachine

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Oliver Robinson is Principal Investigator on an MRC CareerDevelopment Award Fellowship and a Senior ResearchAssociate at the ICN. His research programme attemptsto understand the neuropsychopharmacologicalunderpinnings of anxiety disorders byexamining both patient populations and affectivemanipulations in healthy individuals (especially threat ofshock and pharmacological manipulation). The mainresearch tools used are computerized neuropsychologicaltesting, computational models and functional magneticresonance imaging (fMRI). In his talk, Oliver will focus onhow to safely tune - using psychological and/orpharmacological intervention - prefrontal-subcorticalcircuits, in order to disengage pathological anxiety.

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11.00 LUCY FOULKES

Social reward in healthyand clinical populations

Lucy is a research associate at the ICN. Her research asksquestions such as: why do you spend time with others?What do you enjoy about it? Social reward can be definedas the motivational and pleasurable aspects of interactingwith other people. In this talk, Lucy will give an overview ofwhat social reward is, and describe findings from her ownand others’ research about different types of socialreward. She will consider the importance of age: forexample, do teenagers experience more reward from socialinteractions than other age groups? Then she will discussseveral neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disordersassociated with dysfunctional social reward, includingautism, depression and psychopathy, and the implicationsthis has for people’s social behaviour and relationships.The talk will finish by considering what future researchquestions need to be addressed to better understand howsocial reward is linked to clinical disorder and mentalhealth, and whether we might be able to change people’sexperience of social reward. 7

11.20 - 12.00COFFEE BREAK

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12.00 VAL CURRAN

Cannabis - madness andmedicine?

Val Curran is a Professor of Psychopharmacology at UCL.Her research aims at understanding how psychotropicdrugs like cannabis could be used to explore and therebyenhance our understanding of the neurotransmitter basisof cognitive and emotional processing. Cannabis has beenused throughout history for its medicinal as well as itspleasurable effects. It has also been demonised over morerecent decades for inducing ‘reefer madness’. The drugcontains over 100 completely unique ingredients we call‘cannabinoids’ and levels of these vary widely in differenttypes of cannabis. How does this variation influence theeffects of the drug? This talk will address this question andask what implications our increasing scientificunderstanding of cannabis and our brains’endocannabinoid system has for current debates aboutmedicalization and legalization

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12.20 CAMILLA NORD

Why psychiatry needsneuroscience: the search fornew depression treatments

Camilla is a PhD student working in the CognitiveNeuropsychiatry lab. Her research investigates the neuralbasis of aberrant cognitions in neuropsychiatric disorders,particularly depression. Today, hundreds of thousands ofstudies have been published on the biology of psychiatricdisorders, including depression. But in depression, andamong mental health disorders in general, scientificdiscoveries have led to very few—if any— breakthroughs intreatment. What is preventing us from developing newtreatments in mental health? Using depression as a casestudy, Camilla will discuss some of the major advances inthe search for new treatments, including work from her labin identifying novel brain regions implicated in depression,and applying neuroscientific techniques to psychiatricclinical trials.

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12.40 ROBB RUTLEDGE

Predicting happiness

Robb is an MRC career development fellow who hasrecently opened a new lab at the Max Planck Centre forcomputational psychiatry and aging research. His researchcombines computational modeling with neuroimaging,pharmacology, and neurophysiology to study therelationship between decisions and emotions across thelifespan. Feelings of happiness and sadness are central toconscious human experience, but we still know little aboutwhat happens in the brain when we have these feelings orhow these feelings relate to our past and future decisions.Recently, Robb developed a computational and neuralmodel of happiness that links rewards and expectations tosubjective feelings and to dopamine. His talk will addresshow different methods used in neuroscience can becombined in order to treat people suffering fromdepression and also study healthy individuals.

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13.00 SARAH WHITE

Autism: are you thinkingwhat I think I'm thinkingyou're thinking?

Sarah is a senior research fellow in the metacognition andexecutive functions lab at the ICN her research focusseson mentalising and executive functioning in autismspectrum disorder. Autism is a puzzle. It’s carried in thegenes but we don’t know which genes. It affects moleculesand cells in the brain but we don’t know how. And everyperson with autism seems different but they all have thesame diagnosis. One thing that does seem to draw allthese individuals together is their difficulty mind-reading.In this talk, Sarah will show you some of the experimentsthey've run to investigate mind-reading in autism. And shewill present a new idea for how we might use thatknowledge to help autistic children learn to mind-read.

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13.20 - 14.30LUNCH BREAK

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14.30 KATERINA FOTOPOULOU

The embodied mind

Aikaterini (Katerina) Fotopoulou, PhD, is currently a SeniorLecturer at the Psychoanalysis Unit, Psychology andLanguage Sciences Division, UCL and a research affiliateat the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. There sheresearches body feelings, sensorimotor signals and relatedbody representations in healthy individuals and in patientswith neurological and psychiatric disorders of bodyunawareness. This talk will focus on her current researchprojects on the psychological and neural mechanisms bywhich our interoceptive body feelings, as well asmultimodal representations of the body, are influenced byinternalised social expectations, on-line interactions withother people and by neuropeptides known to enhancesocial feelings.

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14.50 STEVEN DI COSTA

From sensory cues to a senseof agency

Steve is a PhD student working in the Action and Body labat the ICN. His research looks at how feelings of actioncontrol persist and evolve in complex learningenvironments and the brain processes that are thought tounderlie these functions. How we infer agency over eventsin our environment is central to normative humanfunctioning. Researchers now know that numerousdifferent sensory signals have to be combined in order tocreate this subjective feeling of ownership over ouractions. His talk will focus on what factors cause this‘sense of agency’ over our actions, what happens when itgoes wrong, and what cortical regions are activated inorder to create the feeling of control over our actions.

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15.10 JO HALE

Humans versus avatars in thefuture of human mimicryresearchJo is a PhD student in the Social Neuroscience lab at theICN. Her research looks at whether social mimicry canbuild rapport and trust between strangers. People tend tounconsciously copy each other's body language. How arewe able to unconsciously detect that another person isdoing what we just did a few moments ago? The timing ofmimicry may be a crucial factor, but one that has beenhard to study because it is very difficult for a human actorto perform mimicry at a precise time delay in a laboratory.However, using virtual reality technology we can programlifelike avatars to mimic people with much more precisionand control than humans can mimic. In this talk, Jo willoutline how we used virtual avatars to explore the timingof mimicry. She will also talk about some cutting-edgedata showing how people mimic each other in naturalconversations, and how we may use this to build morerealistic avatars in future mimicry research.

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15.30 BAHADOR BAHRAMI

"Take my advice. It will begood for me": theneuroscience of persuadingothers

Bahador is the leader of the Crowd Cognition Group at theICN. His research explores the cognitive andneurobiological basis of cooperation and socialevaluation, from the limits of collective decision making tothe unconscious perception of trust and dominance.When applying for a PhD position, you write that coverletter meant to persuade the reader to take yourapplication seriously. Bahador's talk is about the mentalprocesses behind that cover letter.

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16.00 - 16.10SHORT BREAK

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16.10 PANEL DISCUSSION

How will cognitiveneuroscience affect our livesin the next 20 years?

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Martin Eimer - Martin runs the brain and behavior lab atBirkbeck College. There he studies the relationship betweenovert indicators of task performance and covert responsesgenerated by external and internal cognitive processes.

Nima Khalighinejad - Nima is a PhD student in the action andbody lab at the ICN. He is interested in the sense of agencywe feel over self-caused events and how the frontal andparietal circuits link intentional actions with subsequentoutcomes.

Anna Kuppuswamy - Anna is a postdoctoral research fellow atthe Institute of Neurology. She is interested in understandingwhether fatigue occurring in stroke patients is due only tochanges in motor areas of the cortex.

Geraint Rees - Geraint runs the awareness lab at the ICN.There he uses fMRI in combination with psychophysics andtranscranial magnetic stimulation to understand theunderlying neural mechanisms of our visual awareness.

HOW TO GET THERE

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