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Neuropsychology Beyond the Millennium
La Neuropsychologie Après l'an 2000
October 17 & 18 Octobre
1997
Jeanne Timmins Auditorium
Montreal Neurological Institute
3801 University Street
Montréal, Qc. H3A 2B4
Keynote speaker: Brenda Milner
Neuropsychology: Past, Present and Future
Organisateurs/Organizers
Gabriel Leonard, Ph.D
Alain Ptito, Ph.D
Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital
McGill University
INFORMATION: e-mail: leonard at ego.psych.mcgill.ca
Phone: 514-398-8905
Fax: 514-483-2880 or 514-398-1338
Please visit our WEB site for full information and registration form.
http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/labs/npsi/neuropsych.html
Cost: $190.00 for students $150.00 each for five or more students
$300 for professionals $250.00 each for five or more professionals
Payable to: Neuropsi 3000
215 Wolseley North
Montreal West
Quebec, Canada, H4X 1W1
VENDREDI 17 Octobre
FRIDAY October 17th
Day 1 Faculty
Alain Ptito
08:45-09:00
Introduction and welcoming remarks
Brenda Milner
09:00-10:15
Neuropsychology: Past, present, and future
Maurice Ptito
10:15-11:15
Human Neuroanatomy
11:15-11:30
Coffee
Tomas Paus
11:30-12:30
Functional & Structural Neuroimaging:
Principles of PET, fMRI & MRI
12:30-14:00
Lunch
Robert Zatorre
14:00-15:15
Neuroimaging: Application to Perception
& Cognition
Jean-Guy Villemure
15:15-16:30
Neurosurgery and Neuropsychology:
Inseparable Specialties
16:30-16:45
Announcements
Day 2 SAMEDI 18 Octobre
SATURDAY October 18th
Michael Petrides
08:30-10:00
Functional Organization of the Frontal
Cortex
Marilyn Jones-Gotman
10:00-11:00
Measuring Memory in Health & Disease
11:00-11:15
Coffee
Julien Doyon
11:15-12:15
Neuropsychology of Normal &
Pathological Aging.
12:15-13:45
Lunch
Adele Diamond
13:45-15:30
Development of Frontal Lobe Functions
in Children
Harvey S. Levin
15:45-17:30
Closed head injury: Mechanism,
diagnosis, and rehabilitation.
Gabriel Leonard
17:30-17:45
Conclusion
The following is a profile of some of the speakers:
Dr. Brenda Milner Brenda Milner was born in Manchester, England and was
educated at Newnham College Cambridge, receiving her B.A. in Experimental
Psychology from Cambridge University in 1939, followed by an Sc.D. in 1972. At
the end of World War II (which she spent doing applied research for
the U.K. Ministry of Supply), Milner moved to Canada, where she took up a
teaching position at the newly formed Institut de Psychologie of the
Université de Montréal. A turning-point came with the arrival of D.O. Hebb at
McGill University in 1947. His book The Organization of Behavior was still in
manuscript, and each chapter was being vigorously debated in the weekly
seminar, which Milner attended. In 1950, Hebb invited Milner to go to the
Montreal Neurological Institute to study patients in
whom Dr. Wilder Penfield was carrying out unilateral brain operations for the
relief of focal epilepsy. She has remained there ever since, obtaining her
Ph.D. in physiological psychology from McGill in 1952
and going on to establish a laboratory of neuropsychology at the Institute
where she is currently the Dorothy J. Killam Professor of Cognitive
Neuroscience. In 1964 Milner was appointed a Career
Investigator by the Medical Research Council of Canada.
Milner's early studies of human temporal-lobe function were influenced by the
results of cortical ablation studies in the monkey that pointed to a major
role for the inferotemporal cortex in visual discrimination
learning. The visual deficits that she observed in patients after right
temporal lobectomy (but not after left) indicated a convergence between the
findings for monkey and man, while underscoring the functional asymmetry of
the human cerebral hemispheres. A new departure came with her delineation of
the devastating amnesic syndrome that follows combined bilateral destruction
of the amygdala, hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus, on the medial aspect
of the temporal lobes: this included the demonstration of preserved learning
of motor skills in patients with these lesions. These observations led
Milner to focus much of her subsequent research on the analysis of memory
disorder. Thus, she and her students have demonstrated the important role
played by the right hippocampal region in spatial memory
and by the frontal cortex in the temporal ordering of recent events. Milner
has also explored the relationship between hand preference and speech
lateralization and the effects of early unilateral brain
lesions on the pattern of cerebral organization at maturity.
Brenda Milner has received numerous honors, including the Isaak Walton Killam
Award from the Canada Council, the Hermann von Helmholtz Prize from the
Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the
American Philosophical Society, the Ralph Gerard Prize from the
Society for Neuroscience, the Neural Plasticity Prize from the Ipsen
Foundation (Paris), the Gordon G. Lennox Award from the American Epilepsy
Society, and the Mclaughlin Medal from the Royal Society
of Canada. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada and of the Order of
Quebec, a Fellow of both the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of
Canada and a Foreign Affiliate of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States. In recognition of her research achievements Milner will this
year be inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.
Dr. ADELE DIAMOND received her B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1975 with
majors in bothpsychology and sociology-anthropology. She graduated with
distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, and with NSF and Danforth Graduate Fellowships.
Dr. Diamond was intrigued by the idea that a maturational change
in the brain may help make possible specific cognitive changes during the
first year of life. Her dissertation examining this question was funded by an
NSF doctoral dissertation grant, and she has received continuous federal
funding ever since, from NIH. Dr. Diamond's research focus is on the
functions of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the interrelated
cognitive and perceptual-motor abilities that appear to require that neural
system. She hypothesized that some of the cognitive advances seen in infants
between 7.5-12 months of age are made possible by maturational changes in
prefrontal cortex. By working with both macaques and children, and by studying
both behavior and brain function, she was able to establish one of the first
and strongest direct links between cognitive development and the functions of
a specific neural system. To look at the role of dopamine in early prefrontal
cortex function, Dr. Diamond has been studying children in whom there was
reason to believe that there might be a selective decrease in dopamine in
prefrontal cortex, without other abnormalities in the brain i.e., children
treated early and continuously for phenylketonuria (PKU). Dr. Diamond and her
colleagues have shown that these children are impaired in
the cognitive functions dependent on prefrontal cortex, while unimpaired on
tests of the functions of parietal cortex or the medial temporal lobe. In an
animal model, they investigated the underlying biological mechanism, and
found, as predicted, that the problem appears to lie in the exquisite
sensitivity of the prefrontally-projecting dopamine neurons to the modest
reduction in CNS tyrosine levels found in these children. The dopamine neurons
in the retina share this special sensitivity, and those neurons too
appear to be affected in these children: Reduced dopamine in the retina is
associated with impaired contrast sensitivity, and children treated early and
continuously for PKU have reduced sensitivity to visual contrast. This was the
first demonstration of a visual defect in these children. Before this work,
neuropsychologists had begun to suspect that some children treated early and
continuously for PKU had deficits specific to the cognitive functions
dependent on prefrontal cortex, but no one knew of a mechanism that would
produce that kind of selective effect. Before this work, neuropharmacologists
had been documenting the special characteristics of the dopamine projection to
prefrontal cortex in rats, but there was no evidence on whether this was also
true in humans. Dr. Diamond's work makes that connection and leads to obvious
treatment implications, which she is
currently investigating.
Dr. Diamond is a teacher as well as a researcher, and she has been named a
Lilly Foundation Faculty Teaching Fellow. She is both a developmental
psychologist (a Fellow of Division 7 [Developmental
Psychology] of APA; member of SRCD and the International Society for Infant
Studies; Ph.D. in developmental psychology, Harvard, 1983, with Jerome Kagan)
and a neuroscientist (a Fellow of Division 6 [Behavioral Neuroscience &
Comparative Psychology] of APA; member of Society for
Neuroscience, IBRO, and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.
HARVEY S. LEVIN, Ph.D., received his B.A. in Psychology from the City College
of the City University of New York in 1967. In 1971, he received his M.A. in
Clinical Psychology from the University of Iowa under the mentorship of
Professor Arthur L. Benton, where he also received his Ph.D. in
PSYCHOLOGY/Neuropsychology in 1972 and was the recipient of an NSF graduate
student research fellowship. From 1972 to 1973 he received postdoctoral
training in Neuropsychology with Arthur Benton in the Department of Neurology
at the University of Iowa. In 1973 and 1974 he completed internships at
the University of Iowa Hospitals and the Illinois Masonic Medical Center in
Chicago, Illinois, a teaching hospital for the University of Illinois Medical
School.
Dr. Levin has held faculty appointments at the University of Iowa and the
Veterans Administration Hospital in Iowa City, Iowa. In 1974 he began an
almost 20 year tenure at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in
Galveston, culminating in an endowed chair in which he was named Chela
and Jimmy Storm Distinguished Professor in Surgical Research in the Division
of Neurosurgery, Department of Surgery at UTMB. Dr. Levin left UTMB in 1993 to
accept a position as Professor in the Department of Surgery, Division of
Neurosurgery at the University of Maryland Medical System in
Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Levin is currently Professor and Director of Research
for the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Baylor
College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where he also has appointments to the
Department of Pediatrics and the Department of Neurosurgery.
Dr. Levin has received numerous awards, including the NINDS Javits
Neuroscience Investigator Award, the William F. Caveness Award from the
National Head Injury Foundation, and the Texas Psychological
Association Award for Outstanding Work in the Field of Traumatic Brain Injury.
He is also on the editorial boards of several national scientific journals,
including the Archives of Neurology, Cortex, Neuropsychology, and the Journal
of the International Neuropsychological Society.
Dr. Paus's interest in the study of brain and behavior in humans began in high
school when he collected data for his first scientific paper, on vitamin C and
vigilance. During the subsequent 10 years of medical and Ph.D. studies, Dr.
Paus has endeavoured to learn more about the mechanisms of cognitive
processes, such as attention and volition, by using various methods including
the study of normal development, event-related potentials, the effects of
frontal-lobe lesions and the examination of psychiatric disorders.
Dr. Paus obtained a Post-doctoral Fellowship to work with Drs. Brenda Milner
and Michael Petrides during the growth of functional neuroimaging at the MNI.
Over the past six years he has carried out several blood-flow activation
studies aimed at elucidating brain mechanisms of volition and attention. In
several collaborative studies he has continued to study patients with brain
lesions and has extended the exploration of brain mechanisms of arousal into
other states of consciousness, including sleep and anaesthesia. Dr. Paus has
embarked on morphometric studies of the cerebral cortex, which became
possible due to advances in magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) and computational
neuroanatomy.
Dr. Paus and his colleagues have developed a new technique that allows one to
study neural connectivity in the living human brain. This technique is based
on the concurrent use of transcranial magnetic stimulation and positron
emission tomography. In its first application, they were able to demonstrate
the pathways connecting the human frontal eye-field with the visual cortex.
Besides the mapping of neural connectivity of different cortical regions in
the brain, the technique has strong potential for the study of
the re-mapping of neural pathways following brain injury, or the state of
functional connectivity in schizophrenia.
