Sophie Molholm (born 1966) is an American neuroscientist, who is the director of the Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory (CNL) and the Human Clinical Phenotyping Core (HCP) at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. [1] She is professor (tenured) of Paediatrics, Neuroscience and Psychiatry, and Behavioral Sciences, and was endowed as the Muriel and Harold Block Faculty Scholar in Mental Illness at Einstein (2012–2017). [2]
She was born in London in 1966 and moved to the United States, aged five, to live in Long Island, New York. She lived for two years in Southampton, New York where her family was involved with the educational Lindisfarne Association. She then moved to San Francisco when the Association established their Zen Centre there. She graduated from San Francisco State University with a BA in psychology in 1989. [3] She completed her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2002 with her dissertation: The Cortical Neurophysiology of Visual-Auditory Multisensory Processing in Humans, for which she was awarded the CUNY Outstanding Dissertation Award. [4]
She was a research assistant and later a research fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Cognitive Neurophysiology Lab at the Nathan Kline Institute in her early career. In 2006, she was appointed as an assistant professor in the Program in Cognitive Neurosciences at the City College of New York. She became an associate professor at the college in 2009. In 2010, she moved to The Albert Einstein College of Medicine where she was initially appointed as associate professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Neuroscience. [5] In 2015, she was appointed co-director of the NICHD-funded Rose F. Kennedy Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center at Albert Einstein. [6]
In 2016, she was also appointed as adjunct professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester in New York. [7]
She is the co-director of the NIHD-supported T32 IDD postdoctoral training programme. [8] She was Associate Editor of Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience from 2014 until 2020. [9] She was an associate editor of the European Journal of Neuroscience from 2009 to 2016 and is currently a section editor for that journal [10]
She is a researcher whose work focuses on how the human brain processes and integrates sensory inputs to impact perception and behaviour, and the role of attention in that area. Her research involves characterising these brain processes in healthy adults, tracking their development through childhood. She studies the neurobiology of developmental disorders, with an emphasis on autism.
She has a h-index of 51 and has more than 10,900 citations. [11] Notable publications include 'Multisensory auditory–visual interactions during early sensory processing in humans: a high-density electrical mapping study in Cognitive Brain Research, which has been cited 1,079 times. [12]
Other publications include 'Grabbing your ear: rapid auditory–somatosensory multisensory interactions in low-level sensory cortices are not constrained by stimulus alignment' with 492 citations, [13] 'Multisensory visual–auditory object recognition in humans: a high-density electrical mapping study. with 482 citations, [14] and 'The neural circuitry of pre-attentive auditory change-detection: an fMRI study of pitch and duration mismatch negativity generators', from Cerebral Cortex and which has been cited 442 times. [15]
She was appointed the Muriel and Harold Block Faculty Scholar in Mental Illness at Einstein, New York. She received the Ruth L Kirschstein National Research Service Award for her work in 2004. She was appointed as an external advisory member for the UC Davis MIND IDDRC in 2020. She has received funding for her research from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, Autism Speaks, and the Wallace Research Foundation. [16]
Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions. It is primarily used as a research tool in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and social neuroscience.
The claustrum is a thin sheet of neurons and supporting glial cells, that connects to the cerebral cortex and subcortical regions including the amygdala, hippocampus and thalamus of the brain. It is located between the insular cortex laterally and the putamen medially, encased by the extreme and external capsules respectively. Blood to the claustrum is supplied by the middle cerebral artery. It is considered to be the most densely connected structure in the brain, and thus hypothesized to allow for the integration of various cortical inputs such as vision, sound and touch, into one experience. Other hypotheses suggest that the claustrum plays a role in salience processing, to direct attention towards the most behaviorally relevant stimuli amongst the background noise. The claustrum is difficult to study given the limited number of individuals with claustral lesions and the poor resolution of neuroimaging.
Multisensory integration, also known as multimodal integration, is the study of how information from the different sensory modalities may be integrated by the nervous system. A coherent representation of objects combining modalities enables animals to have meaningful perceptual experiences. Indeed, multisensory integration is central to adaptive behavior because it allows animals to perceive a world of coherent perceptual entities. Multisensory integration also deals with how different sensory modalities interact with one another and alter each other's processing.
In psycholinguistics, language processing refers to the way humans use words to communicate ideas and feelings, and how such communications are processed and understood. Language processing is considered to be a uniquely human ability that is not produced with the same grammatical understanding or systematicity in even human's closest primate relatives.
Neuroplasticity, also known as neural plasticity or brain plasticity, is the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization. It is when the brain is rewired to function in some way that differs from how it previously functioned. These changes range from individual neuron pathways making new connections, to systematic adjustments like cortical remapping or neural oscillation. Other forms of neuroplasticity include homologous area adaptation, cross modal reassignment, map expansion, and compensatory masquerade. Examples of neuroplasticity include circuit and network changes that result from learning a new ability, information acquisition, environmental influences, pregnancy, caloric intake, practice/training, and psychological stress.
In neuroanatomy, thalamocortical radiations, also known as thalamocortical fibres, are the efferent fibres that project from the thalamus to distinct areas of the cerebral cortex. They form fibre bundles that emerge from the lateral surface of the thalamus.
Sensory processing is the process that organizes and distinguishes sensation from one's own body and the environment, thus making it possible to use the body effectively within the environment. Specifically, it deals with how the brain processes multiple sensory modality inputs, such as proprioception, vision, auditory system, tactile, olfactory, vestibular system, interoception, and taste into usable functional outputs.
Supplementary eye field (SEF) is the name for the anatomical area of the dorsal medial frontal lobe of the primate cerebral cortex that is indirectly involved in the control of saccadic eye movements. Evidence for a supplementary eye field was first shown by Schlag, and Schlag-Rey. Current research strives to explore the SEF's contribution to visual search and its role in visual salience. The SEF constitutes together with the frontal eye fields (FEF), the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), and the superior colliculus (SC) one of the most important brain areas involved in the generation and control of eye movements, particularly in the direction contralateral to their location. Its precise function is not yet fully known. Neural recordings in the SEF show signals related to both vision and saccades somewhat like the frontal eye fields and superior colliculus, but currently most investigators think that the SEF has a special role in high level aspects of saccade control, like complex spatial transformations, learned transformations, and executive cognitive functions.
The mismatch negativity (MMN) or mismatch field (MMF) is a component of the event-related potential (ERP) to an odd stimulus in a sequence of stimuli. It arises from electrical activity in the brain and is studied within the field of cognitive neuroscience and psychology. It can occur in any sensory system, but has most frequently been studied for hearing and for vision, in which case it is abbreviated to vMMN. The (v)MMN occurs after an infrequent change in a repetitive sequence of stimuli For example, a rare deviant (d) stimulus can be interspersed among a series of frequent standard (s) stimuli. In hearing, a deviant sound can differ from the standards in one or more perceptual features such as pitch, duration, loudness, or location. The MMN can be elicited regardless of whether someone is paying attention to the sequence. During auditory sequences, a person can be reading or watching a silent subtitled movie, yet still show a clear MMN. In the case of visual stimuli, the MMN occurs after an infrequent change in a repetitive sequence of images.
Mriganka Sur is the Newton Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Simons Center for the Social Brain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a Visiting Faculty Member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and N.R. Narayana Murthy Distinguished Chair in Computational Brain Research at the Centre for Computational Brain Research, IIT Madras. He was on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2010 and has been serving as Jury Chair from 2018.
In neuroscience, the N100 or N1 is a large, negative-going evoked potential measured by electroencephalography ; it peaks in adults between 80 and 120 milliseconds after the onset of a stimulus, and is distributed mostly over the fronto-central region of the scalp. It is elicited by any unpredictable stimulus in the absence of task demands. It is often referred to with the following P200 evoked potential as the "N100-P200" or "N1-P2" complex. While most research focuses on auditory stimuli, the N100 also occurs for visual, olfactory, heat, pain, balance, respiration blocking, and somatosensory stimuli.
In neuroscience, functional specialization is a theory which suggests that different areas in the brain are specialized for different functions.
Barry E. Stein the Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, where he is also Professor of Neurology. He is also director of the joint Cognitive Neuroscience PhD Program between Wake Forest University and the University of Bologna in Italy.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to brain mapping:
April A. Benasich is an American neuroscientist. She is the Elizabeth H. Solomon Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, director of the Infancy Studies Laboratory at the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, and director of the Carter Center for Neurocognitive Research and Professor of Neuroscience at Rutgers University. She is also a principal investigator within the National Science Foundation-funded Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center headquartered at the University of California, San Diego’s Institute for Neural Computation.
Henning Scheich is a German brain researcher and psychiatrist. He was director of the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology until 2010 and head of the institute department until 2013. Since 2014 he serves as the chairman of an emeritus group at the institute. He has made substantial contributions to the field of brain research, in particular on the mechanisms of perception, behaviour and their adaptability. Within the framework of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Science Association he has exerted a lasting influence on the German community of researchers.
Gemma A. Calvert FRSA is a British neuroscientist and pioneer of neuromarketing. She is the founder of Neurosense Limited, the world's first neuromarketing agency established in 1999, and in 2016 she co-founded Split Second Research, a company which provides implicit research for companies worldwide. Calvert is a professor of marketing at the Nanyang Business School at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Riitta Kyllikki Hari is a Finnish neuroscientist, physician and professor at Aalto University. She has led the Brain Research Unit at the Low Temperature Laboratory since 1982. Hari was appointed as Academician of Science on 26 November 2010.
John J. Foxe is an English-born Irish neuroscientist, who is the Kilian J. and Caroline F. Schmitt Chair in Neuroscience at the University of Rochester in New York, where he is Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience. He is a visiting professor at The Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Trinity College Dublin, City University of New York, and the National University of Ireland at Maynooth. He is the editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Neuroscience.
Mark Wallace is an American neuroscientist currently holding the Louise B. McGavock Chair of Neuroscience at Vanderbilt University.