Moshe Bar - US grants
Affiliations: | Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States |
Area:
High Level Vision, Cognitive Neuroscience, Object Recognition, Contextual Processing, first impressions, preference formation and attitudesWebsite:
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The funding information displayed below comes from the NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools and the NSF Award Database.The grant data on this page is limited to grants awarded in the United States and is thus partial. It can nonetheless be used to understand how funding patterns influence mentorship networks and vice-versa, which has deep implications on how research is done.
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High-probability grants
According to our matching algorithm, Moshe Bar is the likely recipient of the following grants.Years | Recipients | Code | Title / Keywords | Matching score |
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2002 — 2005 | Bar, Moshe | R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Top-Down Cortical Facilitation @ Massachusetts General Hospital DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ability to recognize visual objects is a crucial component of our everyday interaction with the environment. Therefore, revealing how object recognition is accomplished is essential for any complete theory for the brain, as well as for our understanding of mental health. Here we focus on early, top-down facilitation during recognition. Anatomical studies have shown that connections between cortical areas are often bi-directional. Nevertheless, the majority of the research related to visual object recognition has concentrated on bottom-up analysis, where the visual input is processed in a cascade of cortical regions that analyze increasingly complex information. By combining imaging methods with complementary strengths to achieve superior spatio-temporal resolution, our preliminary results indicate that early top-down processing may provide a major facilitation during recognition. This facilitation may explain how visual object recognition, a faculty that is far from being realized artificially, can be accomplished strikingly fast in the cortex. We aim to characterize the mechanisms subserving top-down facilitation in object recognition by testing several specific hypotheses. The studies conducted under Specific Aim 1 represent the crucial first stage of localizing the top-down effects in the spatial and temporal domains. The studies that are proposed under Specific Aim 2 should help reveal the mechanisms that trigger the top-down processes, as well as the factors that modulate the magnitude of this facilitation. The results may have the potential of transforming the way we think about the flow of information in the cortex and, subsequently, of shifting the focus of the neurological, cognitive, physiological and computational research of visual object representation and recognition. Finally, object recognition is believed to be mediated primarily by the visual ventral pathway, with recognition itself being accomplished by the inferior temporal cortex. This proposed effort would help expose the role of the prefrontal cortex in visual object recognition, and elucidate the cortical basis for naming-related neurological deficits in patients with anomia and different types of aphasia. |
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2004 — 2008 | Bar, Moshe | R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Contextual Predictions Facilitate Visual Cognition @ Massachusetts General Hospital DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Objects in our environment tend to be grouped in typical contexts. We hypothesize that the human brain extracts such contextual information rapidly and uses it to generate predictions that subsequently guide cognition efficiently. In a series of behavioral and neuroimaging experiments, we have previously revealed the cortical network that is uniquely activated during contextual processing of everyday objects. This network is comprised of three primary foci, located in the parahippocampal cortex, retrosplenial cortex and superior orbital prefrontal cortex. Building on our initial results, we propose fifteen experiments to address three specific aims. In Aim 1 we will define the relative role and properties of each major component in the cortical network that mediates contextual processing, and characterize the cortical dynamics underlying their orchestration. In Aim 2 we will study the interaction between contextual processing and object recognition, and will test our model of how context facilitates recognition. Specifically, we propose that contextual information is extracted rapidly based on coarse information in the image, which subsequently derives predictions that facilitate visual object recognition. Finally, Aim 3 is designed to test our proposal that contextual representations include gist information about objects that tend to share the same "context frame," as well as information about the typical spatial relations among them. The experiments integrate functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), computational methods and purely cognitive and psychophysical experiments. Scene recognition and contextual associations are fundamentally important for many aspects of our day-to-day lives, and understanding how they are accomplished is essential for any complete theory of the brain. Finally, while the focus of the proposed studies is on basic research, it is anticipated that the characterization of these mechanisms would provide a platform from which to evaluate their dysfunctions during mental illness. |
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2009 — 2010 | Bar, Moshe | R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Prefrontal ->Top Down Contribution to Object Recognition @ Massachusetts General Hospital Efficient visual recognition is critical for many aspects of our lives, and understanding how il is accomplished is essential for any complete theory of the brain. One primary reason for the efficiency of object recognition is its facilitation by top-down, feedback processes. We have been tasting a top-down facilitation model according to which coarse, low spatial frequency, image is quickly extracted from early visual regions and projected to the orbitofrontal cortex, where this Agisr'information is used to generate predictions about potential stimulus identity. The predictions are then fed back to the object recognition areas in the inferior temporal cortex to aid the boltom-up processing in the ventral visual stream. Our previous studies have already revealed a recognition network in which the spatio-temporal dynamics of cortical events, and the primary information exchanged, are consistent with OUf top-down facilitation model. These findings raise a host of important questions about the structural, functional and communication properties of the top-down facilitation network. In particular, we propose to apply our multimodal imaging approach. capitalizing on the complementary strengths of psychophysical paradigms, functional and diffusion MRI, and magnetoencephalography to achieve the following specifiC aims: 1) To study the nature of the prefrontal cortex representations that participate in faCilitating object recognition; 2) To begin characterizing the properties of the pathways mediating top-down facilitation; and 3) To reveal how top-down predictions are generated and integrated with the bottom-up stream. It is expected that the outcome of the six experiments proposed here will provide the foundations and will subsequently stimulate a critical expansion of these aims. We antiCipate thai the characterization of these mechanisms will inform clinical mOdels underlying several disorders. For example, magnocellular pathway abnormalities have been associated with visual deficits in schizophrenia and dyslexia. In addition the proposed examination of the cortical visual pathways will enhance our understanding of visual impairments such as visual agnOSia and anomia, prosopagnosia and achromatopsia. Lastly, the proposed DTI experiments can contribute insights for the treatment of demyelination diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. |
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2009 — 2013 | Bar, Moshe | N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Arra: Contextual Contribution in Brain and Cognition @ Massachusetts General Hospital This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). |
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2010 — 2012 | Bar, Moshe | R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
A Cognitive Neuroscience Framework For Understanding and Treating Mood Disorders @ Massachusetts General Hospital DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In the last decade, psychologists have begun to focus their attention on how to cultivate a better life and on the benefits of positive mood. These efforts have been often limited by a lack of understanding of how the human brain works. Our cognitive neuroscience approach has led to a novel hypothesis, connecting mood and depression with cognitive processing and brain structure and function. Specifically, we propose that mood can be improved significantly when mental processes are made more associative. This relation stems from our inherent need to predict and explore many alternatives in parallel. The hypothesis presented here represents a multidisciplinary synthesis, integrating remote findings. For example, that the same medial prefrontal region that is most indicative of depression treatment success is intensely activated by our cognitive tasks engaging associative and contextual predictions;or the link between the central role of the hippocampus in associative processing and recent indications that the effectiveness of depression therapy is dependent upon the growth of new hippocampal neurons. This framework has many implications, most notably for diagnosing and treating emotional disorders such as depression, for better understanding a host of mood disorders such as, attention-deficit, bi-polar and post traumatic stress disorders, for contextualizing adult hippocampal neurogenesis, and more generally, for increasing well-being and longevity by improving mood. Among mood disorders, major depressive disorder is a leading cause of disability, affecting annually more than 15 million people, with an estimated economic impact exceeding $50 billion in the United States alone. Although restoring the neurochemical balance has been the primary strategy for treating depression, many patients do not achieve adequate response. The adverse characteristics of depression contribute to long-term structural and functional neurobiological alterations that in turn, are known to further increase the probability and the number of future depressive episodes. We propose a novel perspective to essentially reverse this spiraling progression of the disorder without any adverse side effects using a cognitive neuroscience framework. We adopt a multimodal imaging approach, capitalizing on the complementary strengths of psychophysical paradigms, fMRI and magnetoencephalography, to achieve the following specific aims: In Aim 1 we will test all relevant aspects of the relationship between associative predictions and mood, in healthy adults and in clinical populations. This will include the relation between associative processing and: brain structure, brain activation, subjective performance, nature of individual thought patterns, and mood measures. In Aim 2 we plan to investigate the neural mechanism connecting mood with associative processing, focusing on morphological characteristics, network dynamics and functional interactions. Finally, in Aim 3 we plan to use our accumulated knowledge to start developing a non-intrusive approach, free of side-effects, to train and rebuild the underlying cortical circuitry such that thought pattern is modified from its core to better serve mood-related well-being. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: In this proposal we hypothesize a direct link between depression and associative cognitive processing. Finding that reduced cognitive associative processing has a causal role in mood disorders would have profound implications for theories of major depression and other affective disorders. Translating these findings to the design of novel cognitive tasks that can enhance associative processing and help to alleviate the effects of depression has the potential to positively impact millions of individuals suffering from mood disorders. |
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