Auditory & Integrative Functions of the Prefrontal Cortex DIVERSITY SUPPLEMENT

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SUMMARY In this diversity supplement we are proposing a year of research and training for the candidate to perform research in the laboratory of Dr. Lizabeth Romanski. Three experiments are proposed. In supplemental experiment 1, the candidate will examine the role of the medial prefrontal cortex in performance monitoring and error detection. To do this he will train subjects to perform a more difficult version of the audiovisual working memory task. This will allow for the examination of the neural activity during errors and increased difficulty. In Experiment 2, the candidate will use the Oddball task to determine how ventral prefrontal ensembles detect incongruent audiovisual pairs of stimuli. Use of this easy-to-train task will allow the testing of many more stimulus pairs than traditional working memory paradigms. In Experiment 3, the temporal binding of face-vocalization communication stimuli will be examined by altering the SOA of the auditory and visual components and recording the expected change in ventral prefrontal neurons to these asynchronies. The results of these studies will inform us of the role of prefrontal cortex in detecting and integrating specific features of communication information that are directly related to contextual relevance of stimuli and the importance of the temporal relationship of vocal information and associated mouth movements. The experiments are logical extensions of the parent grant and are an efficient approach to gaining more information from valuable resources already in place in our laboratory.