Neuroinformatics and Cognitive Ontologies

Decades of cognitive neuroimaging work has identified distinct patterns of brain activation that occur during performance of different tasks, as well as revealed patterns task-general activation and deactivation. These data can in principle be used to provide the basis for constructing biologically informed, data-driven taxonomies of psychological processes. This talk will highlight some of the progress and challenges associated with the construction of cognitive ontologies based on functional neuroimaging data.

Speaker Bio: After receiving a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the psychology department at UCLA in 2006, Dr. Uddin completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Child Study Center at NYU. For several years she worked as a faculty member in Psychiatry & Behavioral Science at the Stanford School of Medicine before joining the psychology department at the University of Miami in 2014. Her lab is broadly focused on investigating the relationship between brain connectivity and cognition in typical and atypical development. Within a cognitive neuroscience framework, this research combines functional and structural connectivity analyses to examine the organization of large-scale brain networks supporting high-level cognitive processes. Current projects focus on understanding dynamic network interactions underlying cognitive flexibility in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism as well as characterizing network and individual variability across the lifespan.