Program  in  Cognitive  Affective  Neuroscience (PICAN)

Links and Resources

Labs & Groups

  • BAM Lab (pitt.edu)
  • NITO Lab
    PICAN faculty collaborator, Dr. Rebecca Price’s research group website
  • CAN Lab
    Pittsburgh Clinical Application of Neuroscience Laboratory – PICAN faculty collaborator, Dr. Rebecca Price
  • TREND Artist in Residence Series
    The Transdisciplinary Research in Emotion, Neuroscience, and Development (TREND) Artist in Residence Series
  • The Biometrics Research Program
    Devoted to understanding physiological correlates of cognition in individuals with and without psychopathology

Other

  • The movie Blade Runner was set in November 2019 and put the use of pupilometry on the map. In honor of Blade Runner Day, the Program in Cognitive Affective Neuroscience and Biological Affect Modulation (BAM) lab (Kym Young, PI) have collaborated to record and show actual physiology (pupil dilation, EEG) on the Baseline Task used, in the movie, to determine whether a replicant is emotionally deviant.
    We proudly present a single case study of a decidedly human volunteer on that task     here. Please feel free to retweet the YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kRdoMpSU2s&feature=youtu.be.

Animations & Pictures

  • Animation showing the location of the amygdala
    Roma Konecky and Greg Siegle made this from an SPGR image acquired on a 1.5T GE scanner using BrainVoyager to align and smooth the image, MRICro to trace the amygdala, AFNI to create the rendering, and WWW Gif Animator to concatenate the frames.
  • Animation showing the mean of 25 control participants’ brain activity associated with rating the personal relevance of positive words.
    The animation was made by generating a snapshot of regions significantly different (p<0.001) from the pre-trial baseline at each TR (1.5 seconds) for the 12 second trial (in AFNI), and interpolating between them (in Virtual Dub). As shown in the animation the anterior cingulate reacts early, followed slightly later by BA47, a brain region associated with rumination. Data from Siegle, G.J., Thompson, W., Thase, M.E., Steinhauer, S.R., Carter, C. S., (in press). Increased amygdala and decreased dorso-lateral prefrontal BOLD responses in unipolar depression: Related and independent features. Biological Psychiatry. Animation by Greg Siegle and Lena Gemmer.

Software & Research Projects