Focused workshop on

“Biological underpinnings of cognitive abilities in health and disorder”

 

Organizers:

Changsong Zhou (Hong Kong Baptist University, Beijing Computational Science Research Center)

Werner Sommer (Humboldt University at Berlin, Germany)

 

Objectives:

People differ in their cognitive abilities. Various factors could underlie such individual differences, including genetics, brain anatomy and brain activity. Studying such biological bases and model its correlation to inter-person cognitive variability is also the foundation to better understand aging effects and brain diseases. This focused workshop aims to bring together several experts from Germany on individual differences in inter-person communication ability, such as face and emotion recognition, with colleagues from mainland, specializing in cognition and learning, brain imaging, and neurodegenerative diseases, for a scientific exchange with the aim to identify complementary topics and discuss collaborative projects.

 

The German colleagues have strong expertise on psychometric measurement issues.  The mainland colleagues are working actively on brain imaging/EEG on healthy individuals and persons with various disorders, either on resting or task processing states. The reliability within and variability across individuals is a central issue, but so far the emphasis in the field has been mainly on reliability. The systematic variability resulting from individual differences could be very informative and important for the study of normal and abnormal functions, in particular in the connection to identifying sensitive markers for early diagnoses of disorders and diseases from brain imaging/psychometric measures, since we need to come to the individual level. Therefore the meeting could lead to active exchange between complementary expertise and could result in opportunities of multi-lateral collaborations.

 

Venue and time: The workshop will be held the Beijing Computational Science Research Center (CSRC) (http://www.csrc.ac.cn/), April 1 to 3, 2014. See transportation information at the end of this file.

 

Invitation to participate: Interested researchers and students are welcome to attend the talks. Attendance is free, however, due to limited budget, meals are not provided for non-speaker participants from Beijing.