Professor Lalor receives SPIN Grant

October 12, 2017


stwesfProfessor Edmund Lalor is co-PI with Professor Rajeev Raizada (Brain & Cognitive Sciences) on a project funded by the Schmitt Program on Integrative Neuroscience (SPIN) titled, "Indexing the dynamic encoding of natural speech at the semantic level." The overarching aim of the present proposal is to combine expertise between the Lalor and Raizada groups in the Departments of Neuroscience, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering to determine whether or not EEG responses to natural speech can be decoded based on the semantic content of that speech. The work aims at leveraging recent ground-breaking innovations from the Lalor and Raizada labs to develop an inexpensive, interpretable, and easily acquired neurophysiological measure of the semantic processing of natural speech. Such a measure could have enormous impact on research on language development in healthy infants as well as in children with intellectual and developmental disorders in which language processing is impaired. It would also have great potential as a biomarker for presymptomatic cognitive decline in older persons. 

The Schmitt Program on Integrative Neuroscience (SPIN) is a campus-wide initiative to promote our understanding of the nervous system and its disorders. The Program emphasizes interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to novel and creative research and training that uniquely exploit talents from multiple laboratories across traditional institutional boundaries.