News
Conference on Motor Speech – Guenther lab participation
Many members of the Guenther Lab recently attended the Nineteenth Biennial Conference on Motor Speech in Savannah, Georgia, Feb 22 – 25, 2018. Principal Investigator Dr. Frank Guenther gave a talk titled, Quantitatively Assessing the DIVA Model with Neuroimaging.
Dr. Jason Tourville presented a poster titled, Functional boundaries within the cortical speech motor control network.
Graduate student Saul Frankford presented a poster titled, Impaired responses to time-shifting perturbations in adults who stutter during rhythmic and non-rhythmic speech.
Dante Smith presents his research at the Society for Neuroscience 2017 meeting in Washington D.C.
From November 11 - 15, 2017, graduate student Dante Smith had the opportunity to attend the Society for Neuroscience 2017 meeting and present his research.
At this meeting he presented a poster on his project investigating voice motor control, and the vocal responses by human subjects when they experienced changes to their somatosensory feedback. In these experiments, participants vocalized a steady-state vowel, while having the position of their larynx non-invasively displaced. These participants could not hear their own voice during this task, by method of loud masking noise present in headphones, and thus any recorded response was a result of correcting for changes to their somatosensory feedback. Characterizing how participants modulate their voice to correct for errors will improve our understanding of voice motor control and allow for the creation of more robust and efficient voice disorder therapies.
Dante's poster received interest and feedback from students, post-docs and professors working in speech neuroscience, computational neuroscience, and rehabilitation science. While making new contacts with international researchers and shared ideas on experimental design, analysis of speech samples, and speech motor control theory, Dante looks forward to his next scientific conference where he can further share projects and ideas about speech neuroscience.
Our new lab space is up and running!
The summer of 2017 brought many changes for the Guenther Lab, the most noticeable being our relocation of our main lab space at 635 Commonwealth Ave to 677 Beacon Street. After months of construction, packing, and finally the big move, the new lab is fully operational! Here are a few pictures of the new space.
Guenther Lab brain-machine interface research featured in Christian Science Monitor
Our brain-machine interface that detects when a human observer sees a robot making a mistake was featured in an article on human-robot interactions in The Christian Science Monitor titled: Robot communication: It's more than just talk. This article discusses work at Boston University as well as MIT and the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
Guenther lab members present at the 7th International Conference on Speech Motor Control
The Guenther Lab's Principal Investigator, Frank Guenther, and Assistant Director, Jason Tourville recently attended the 7th International Conference on Speech Motor Control held in Groningen, the Netherlands. The conference, which takes place roughly once every 5 years, brings together colleagues from leading research groups that study speech motor control and related disorders.
During the "Windows on the Brain" session, Dr. Tourville discussed efforts to leverage the lab's large database of speech production fMRI data to identify reliable functional boundaries within the speech motor control neural network. Later in the session, Dr. Guenther described a framework that we have developed to quantitatively assess neurocomputational models of speech production using neuroimaging data.
Presentation given by Assistant Professor Jason Tourville.
Enjoying some down time in Groningen, from left: Dr. Jason Whifield, Anna Gravelin, Dr. John Houde, Gabe Cler, Dr. Frank Guenther, Liz Heller Murray, Dr. Cara Stepp, Dr. Jay Bohland, Dr. Catherine Theys, Dr. Jason Tourville
Press coverage of our error-detecting robotic brain-computer interface
Our brain-computer interface that detects when a human observer sees a robot making a mistake has gotten a lot of press coverage in the past two weeks, including articles on NPR, Newsweek, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Wired, New Scientist, Discover, and over 100 other popular and scientific news outlets. Congratulations to Guenther Lab PhD student Andrés Salazar-Gómez as well as our collaborators in the Rus Lab at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory!
Oculomotor brain-computer interface article published
Decoding of intended saccade direction in an oculomotor brain-computer interface
In collaboration with Prof. Earl Miller's lab at MIT, several lab members, including first author Nan Jia, worked on a novel BCI paradigm involving the eye movement system in the brain. By implanting microarrays in multiple prefrontal areas in monkeys, high online BCI performance was achieved using novel LFP signals. This study is one of the first to demonstrate and explore the feasibility to utilize the oculomotor system for BCI purposes.
Dissertation Defense – Nan Jia
Notice of Dissertation Defense
Nan Jia
Candidate for the degree of Ph.D. in Cognitive and Neural Systems
Title: DEVELOPING AN OCULOMOTOR BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACE AND CHARACTERIZING ITS DYNAMIC FUNCTIONAL NETWORK
Friday, December 9, 2016
1:30 pm
CompNet Building Room B02
Boston University
Graduate Program for Neuroscience
677 Beacon Street
Boston
(Advisor: Professor Frank Guenther)
Dissertation Defense – Andrés F. Salazar-Gómez
Notice of Dissertation Defense
Andrés F. Salazar-Gómez
Candidate for the degree of Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience
Title: ERROR-RELATED POTENTIALS FOR ADAPTIVE DECODING AND VOLITIONAL CONTROL
Friday, December 2, 2016
10am
CompNet Building Room B02
Boston University
Graduate Program for Neuroscience
677 Beacon Street
Boston
(Advisor: Professor Frank Guenther)
Article in Spectrum highlights lab’s autism research
Guenther lab research was highlighted in an article in Spectrum, titled, "Imaging study hints at compensation in verbal teens with autism". This article discusses a talk titled, Neural bases of language phenotypes in Autism Spectrum Disorder, given by Jennifer Segawa at this year's Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego. This research was a collaboration between the Guenther lab at BU and Dara Monoach and colleagues at MGH.
