Date & time
Friday, January 26, 2024
12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
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Workshops & seminars
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A School of Health Colloquium
Speaker(s)
Enrico Quilico, PhD and Reza Farivar, PhD
Cost
This event is free
Organization
School of Health
Contact
Where
Online
Health Behaviour Changes for Health-Related Outcomes
by Enrico Quilico, Ph.D., M.A., B.Ed.,
Developing and testing sustainable health behaviour change programs in the community is challenging due to common barriers (e.g., stakeholder engagement, human/financial resources, and operational guidelines).
The first half of this talk will focus on the implementation of a peer-based physical activity program for adults with moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury across Dr. Quilico’s PhD research with multiple collaborators at the institutional, organizational, and community level, as well as the biopsychosocial outcomes that resulted.
The second half will focus on the collaborative work Dr. Quilico is involved with through the North Texas TBI Model System and the line of research he is developing through his postdoc.
The presentation will extend study results with insight about engaging communities and institutions through evidence-based interventions that bridge the gap between the clinical and community context with peer-based, autonomy-supportive approaches. Implications for creating, implementing, and testing health behaviour interventions across the continuum of care will be discussed.
The Secret Lives of Representations
by Reza Farivar, PhD
In our quest for understanding brain function, we know that any model or operation we infer will ultimately be limited by the paradigms we use for cortical representations. Prior to 2008, it was difficult to define representations that could be compared or contrasted across species, modalities, and brain regions, but with the advent of Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA; Kriegeskorte, Mur, and Bandettini, 2008), this problem appeared to be solved—by capturing pairwise relations in the response of a system to different conditions, one could construct a representational similarity (or dissimilarity) matrix (RDM) and then compare RDMs across species, modalities, or brain regions, and carry out conventional statistics on these representations.
In this talk, I will discuss the fundamental limitations of RSA in the context of the shape of data—that RSA can err in situations and infer similarity between two representations when they are in fact ontologically dissimilar. I then will present our complimentary framework that leverages topological analysis, termed Representational Topology Analysis (RTA). RTA utilizes tools from algebraic topology that allow us to probe the shape of data captured in an RDM, and integrates statistical inference tools that allow us to test whether two RDMs have similar sub-structures.
I will then review two example datasets—the first from the Kriegeskorte et al. (2008) paper, and the second from Zhang and Farivar (2020)—and show how RTA can elegantly reveal the shape of neural representations, increase our sensitivity to differences between species and conditions, and allow for integration of data from different studies. We then introduce an innovative means of simultaneously visualizing topological and geometric features of the representational space.
The talk is for a general psychology, neuroscience, and behavioural neuroscience audience, and the tools are generalizable to all complex multivariate data.
Speaker Bios:
Dr. Quilico completed his Ph.D. in Rehabilitation Sciences Institute at the University of Toronto and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation of Greater Montreal, where his research focused on co-creating, implementing, and evaluating a community-based peer-led physical activity program for adults with moderate-to-severe TBI that was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Dr. Quilico obtained a graduate degree in Adapted Physical Activity from McGill University and an undergraduate degree in Education from Concordia University. He has been working as an advocate for TBI awareness since 2008 and was recognized for my contributions as a Global Hero in 2020, the winner of the 2019 SSHRC Storyteller Competition and the 2018 Change-Maker Awardee by the Neurological Health Charities of Canada.
Dr. Farivar is the Director of the MGH MRI Research Facility, Scientific Director of the MUHC TBI Program, and Associate Professor of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences.
His lab, based in the Montreal General Hospital, pursues three themes of research:
1. Tools and Fundamentals of Neuroimaging: his group develops new MRI technologies such as receiver coils for higher sensitivity or for unique applications; develops techniques for very high-resolution structural and functional imaging; and investigates information content and physiology of fMRI signals using novel tools from algebraic topology.
2. Brain representation and processing of vision: researchers in his team are studying the nature of brain signals during naturalistic viewing of vivid scenes; representations of objects from pure 3-D depth cues, and how early visual cortex represents information from complex scenes.
3. Disease and recovery models: in addition to studying cortical processing in the normal population, his team also investigates theories of amblyopia (lazy eye), effects of brain injury (concussions), and is launching a project to use his high-resolution techniques in Alzheimer detection.
In addition to neuroscience research, he is developing a new framework that empowers students to carry out lab-to-world impact (www.mcgill.ca/connectional). This framework, grounded in the cognitive psychology of learning and knowledge representation, formalizes and integrates the processes of ideation, problem finding, and scoping, and results in a set of tools and paradigms that jointly lead to new relationships between laboratory knowledge and expertise, and real-world needs.
Reza Farivar obtained his undergraduate in Psychology (Honours with Distinction) from University of Victoria and pursued his graduate studies (M.Sc. and PhD in Psychology) at McGill University, funded by NSERC and FRQS. He carried out his postdoctoral work as a Fellow in Radiology at Harvard Medical School (Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital) working with Wim Vanduffel and Larry Wald on advanced neuroimaging techniques for human and non-human imaging. He joined McGill’s Department of Ophthalmology in 2012 and held the Canada Research Chair in Integrative Neuroscience. His work has been funded by grants from CIHR, NSERC, CFI, Mitacs, and Medteq.