Attention-dependent neural oscillations in the human olfactory system

描述（由申请人提供）：为Christina Zelano博士提出职业发展计划，她致力于研究人类嗅觉系统的神经基础。美国西北大学人类嗅觉领域的知名学者Jay Gottfried博士将担任主要导师。此外，西北纪念医院综合癫痫中心主任Stephan Schuele博士将作为合作者参与拟议的研究，加州大学伯克利分校Helen Wills神经科学研究所所长Robert Knight博士将作为拟议研究项目的顾问。培训将包括脑皮质电图（ECoG）和电刺激技术，用于测量正在接受脑外科手术的癫痫患者的气味诱发脑活动。本研究的总体目标是表征人类大脑中嗅觉注意神经相关物的时间演化和频率组成。由于大脑嗅觉结构位于大脑边缘、颞叶和额叶的深处，因此产生的电信号

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A career development plan is proposed for Dr. Christina Zelano, who is committed to a research career studying the neural substrates of the human olfactory system. Dr. Jay Gottfried, a renowned scholar in the field of human olfaction at Northwestern University will function as the primary mentor. Furthermore, Dr. Stephan Schuele, Directory of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at Northwestern Memorial Hospital will contribute to the proposed research as a collaborator, and Dr. Robert Knight, Director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at University of California, Berkeley will contribute as a consultant on the proposed research projects. Training will involve electrocorticography (ECoG) and electrical stimulation techniques for the measurement of odor-evoked brain activity in patients who are undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy. The overall goal of the proposed research is to characterize the temporal evolution and frequency composition of olfactory attentional neural correlates in the human brain. Because olfactory brain structures are located deep within the limbic temporal and frontal portions of the brain, the electrical signals generated from these regions are severely attenuated at the scalp, limiting the value of surface EEG in measuring olfactory local field potentials. To overcome this problem, the proposed research will optimize an olfactory (ECoG) paradigm in which electrical signals are recorded directly from olfactory brain structures in patients who are undergoing brain surgery for intractable epilepsy. Using this technique, the precise timing and frequency of olfactory attentional oscillations will b investigated. Several aspects of olfactory attention will be explored, from basic (state-dependent gating of incoming odor information) to more complex (modality specific) mechanisms. Given the lack of a requisite pre-cortical thalamic relay in the olfactory system, the proposed research will test the hypothesis that sensory gating of olfactory information occurs at the level of the olfactory bulb, upstream from olfactory (piriform) cortex. Olfactory sensory gating will be explored through two separate experiments making use of ECoG and fMRI techniques. The proposed research will use ECoG approaches to test two specific hypotheses regarding complex forms of olfactory attention. First, experiments are proposed to determine the spatiotemporal composition of neural oscillatory responses in relation to modality-specific olfactory attentional mechanisms. Second, experiments are proposed to determine the neural origins and spectro-temporal patterns of olfactory predictive coding mechanisms. Further studies will make use of electrical stimulation techniques to establish the necessity of identified brain regions in the formation of predictive spectro-temporal odor templates. The proposed research has applications to a broad range of neurological disorders that present with olfactory deficits, including Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia.