Lucia-Maria Vaina, MD, PhD
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Lecturer, Harvard Medical School
Assistant in Experimental Psychology, Massachusetts General Hospital
M.D , ,
Ph.D , ,
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I am interested in the plasticity of neural and cognitive basis of human perception in multisensory environments and in sensory-motor environments and in the spatio-temporal orchestration of multisensory perception in stroke patients. In particular, I am interested in how the normal and damaged human brain organizes, represents, and selects information that arrives from different sensory and sensory-motor modalities What are the neural mechanisms and how and when they interact and how and when this interaction changes during the selection and coordination of the distributed brain activity that produces a flow of adapted and unified cognitive web? What is the effect of brain damage on the integrity and computational efficiency of this cognitive network, how its neuronal substrate changes over time and how such change correlates with behavior (improvement)? I use a range of different methods, including behavioral experimentation/psychophysics, computational modeling, neuropsychological & behavioral neurology approaches with brain-damaged patients, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). We use different computational approaches (e..g graph theoretical, small world networks, dynamic Granger causality) to study the human connectome at the behavioral level and how it changes in stroke recovery.
