Archived News

August 2016

• Many of us in the Culham Lab are remembering former lab postdoc (2004-2006), Cristiana Cavina Pratesi, who passed away on August 1, 2016.  Cristiana was a talented and creative scientist who made many important discoveries.  She was a doctoral student with Carlo Marzi in Verona, a postdoc with Mel Goodale and Jody Culham at Western, a postdoc with David Milner at Durham University and then a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at Durham.  In the Culham Lab, she discovered dissociations between object processing for grasping vs. perception (Cavina-Pratesi et al., 2007), identified a brain region, SPOC, that plays a role in arm transport (Cavina-Pratesi et al., 2010), contributed to a review of parietal lobe function (Culham, Cavina-Pratesi & Singhal, 2006), and was an active co-author on many other papers (for which in many cases, she played a key role in mentoring junior trainees). She was also a warm, funny, curious, generous lab member, colleague and friend. She will be greatly missed by all.
• Those who wish to remember Cristiana can visit her tribute site or make a donation in her memory.

July 2016

 Sara Fabbri's ambitious paper using Representational Similarity Analysis to investigate object grasping has been published:

• Fabbri, S., Stubbs, K. M., Cusack, R., & Culham, J. C. (2016). Disentangling representations of object and grasp properties in the human brain. Journal of Neuroscience, 36(29), 7648-7662. 

May 2016

• PI Jody Culham has entered the "nomadical" phase of her sabbatical, which will take her to Jamaica, Alberta, the U. K., Portugal, Germany and Japan.
• The first collaborative paper from the Culham Lab and our Canada-Germany CREATE-IRTG partners is out:
  • Gerhard, T. M., Culham, J. C. & Schwarzer, G. (2016). Distinct visual processing of real objects and pictures of those objects in 7- to 9-month-old infants. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 7, 827.

 March 2016

• Congratulations to postdoc Erez Freud, recipient of an Israeli Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

January 2016

• Welcome to postdoctoral fellow Kaitlin Laidlaw, who has joined the Culham and Goodale labs following her PhD at UBC.  Congratulations to Kaitlin for winning an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship (which pre-empted a Brain and Mind Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship).
• Recent papers:

• Squires, S. D., Macdonald, S. N., Culham, J. C., & Snow, J. C. (2016). Priming tool actions: Are real objects more effective primes than pictures? Experimental Brain Research,  234(4), 963-976.
• Thaler, L., Paciocco, J. Daley, M., Lesniak, G. D., Purcell, D. W., Fraser, J. A., Dutton, G. N., Rossit, S., Goodale, M. A., & Culham, J. C. (2016). A selective impairment of perception of sound motion direction in peripheral space: A case study. Neuropsychologia , 80, 79-89.
• Stöttinger, E., Filipowicz, A., Valadao, D., Culham, J., Goodale, M., Anderson, B., & Danckert, J. (2016). A cortical network that marks the moment when conscious representations are updated. Neuropsychologia, 79, 113-122.

October 2015

• Media coverage of Dr. Jacqueline Snow's recent Journal of Neuroscience paper
  • Snow, J. C., Goodale, M. A., & Culham, J. C. (2015). Preserved haptic shape processing after bilateralLOC lesions. Journal of Neuroscience, 35(40), 13745-13760..

September 2015

• Lab PI Jody Culham has begun her sabbatical for 2015-16 and is now in at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC) at the University of Trento in Italy.  She will be at CIMeC in Trento (Sept. 2015-Feb 2016) and at SISSA in Trieste Italy (March-April 2016) before beginning a "nomadical" phase (May-Aug 2016) that will take her to Oxford and the UK, Marburg & Giessen Germany, and Asia.
• Welcome to Dr. Erez Freud, a new postdoctoral fellow who will be co-supervised with Dr. Marlene Behrmann at Carnegie-Mellon University and based in Pittsburgh
• Congratulations to Dr. Jenni Karl, a postdoc in the Culham Lab (2014-15) who landed a tenure-track faculty position at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops BC.
• Congratulations to Margarita Malseva, who successfully defended her Master's thesis on "Congruent familiar size relationships decrease size contrast illusion" in August 2015 and will be pursuing a PhD in the Culham lab
• We have several new papers published or in press: 
  • Quinlan, D. J., & Culham, J. C. (In press). Direct comparisons of hand and mouth kinematics during grasping, feeding and fork-feeding actions. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
  • Macdonald, S. N. & Culham, J. C. (2015). Do human brain areas involved in visuomotor actions show a preference for real tools over visually similar non-tools? Neuropsychologia, 77, 35-41.
  • Barnett-Cowan, M., Snow, J. C., & Culham, J. C. (2015). Contribution of bodily and gravitational orientation cues to face and letter recognition. Multisensory Research, 28(5-6), 427-442.
  • Hutchison, R. M., Culham, J. C., Flanagan, J. R., Everling, S., & Gallivan, J. P. (2015). Functional subdivisions of medial parieto-occipital cortex in humans and nonhuman primates using resting-state fMRI. NeuroImage, 116, 10-29. 

April 2015:

Two new papers from the lab have been published:

• Gallivan, J. P., & Culham, J. C. (2015). Neural coding within human brain areas involved in actions. Invited review article, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 33, 141-149.
• Monaco, S., Sedda, A., Cavina-Pratesi, C, & Culham, J. C. (2015). Neural correlates of object size and object location during grasping actions. European Journal of Neuroscience, 41(4), 454-465.

September 2014:

• Welcome to two new members of the lab.  Jenni Karl, who won an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship, will be joining the lab following her PhD at the University of Lethbridge.  Ben Chang will be joining the lab as a doctoral student following his Master's from Queen's University.
• Thanks to those leaving the lab for their valued contributions.  Joey Paciocco (former Master's student and Research Assistant) will be taking on a new position as a Program Coordinator at the Student Success Centre at Western.  Haleemah and Hameedah Ahmed (former visiting scholars) will be returning to the University of Bologna.

July 2014

• NSERC has announced the award of a Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) Grant to a team at York, Western and Queen's Universities for joint training with labs in German at Philipps-Universität Marburg and Justus-Liebig Universität in Giessen (funded by a partnered German DFG IRTG grant). The CREATE grant will be headed by Doug Crawford at York.  The Culham Lab has two participating trainees (Lucilla Cardinali, postdoctoral fellow; Ben Chang, PhD student) and one affiliated student (Rita Maltseva, Master's student).  We may be looking for additional students to participate once Jody returns from her sabbatical in Fall 2016.  More information is available at http://www.uni-marburg.de/fb13/forschung/neurophysik/brainact

June 2014

• Culham Lab alumna Christine Carter was featured in an online piece by the National Arts Centre.

May 2014

• Our work with a woman who has a fascinating neurological syndrome was featured on National Public Radio in the US in a piece called "The Blind Woman Who Sees Rain, But Not Her Daughter's Smile." You can hear a 10-min radio interview or see a 3-min video simulating her visual experiences.

February 2014:

• Congratulations to Culham Lab alumna Sara Fabbri, recognized for her excellence by Radboud University! 
• We are pleased to welcome TC Chiang to our lab. TC has some exciting research planned using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

January 2014:

• Sara Fabbri has taken a post doctoral position at Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands. We will miss Sara and wish her all the best in her new position

November 2013:

• Jody Culham is participating in Research Matters, a public research initiative run by the Council of Ontario Universities that explores how Ontario university research affects everyday life, and improves the ways people live, work and play.  She will be participating in a free public event in London on November 26, 2013 to discuss "What Matters Now?"

October 2013:

• Jody Culham did an interview with Nora Young on CBC Radio1's Spark program. She discussed work done in collaboration with Jacqueline Snow (former postdoctoral fellow, now a professor at the University of Nevada Reno) on how real objects differ from photographs. You can listen to the interview here, or download the podcast here.

September 2013:

• Welcome to Margarita Maltseva, new Master's student in Psychology

August 2013:

• Congratulations to Dr. Michael Barnett-Cowan, former Banting postdoctoral fellow and new Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo

July 2013:

• Congratulations to Dr. Jacqueline Snow, former postdoctoral fellow and new Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada Reno

June 2013 Recent Papers:

• Gallivan, J. P., McLean, D. A., Valyear, K. F., & Culham, J. C. (2013). Decoding the neural mechanisms of human tool use. eLife, 2, e00424 [new online open-access general biology journal sponsored by Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Institute and Wellcome Trust]. 
• Gallivan, J. P., Chapman, C. S., McLean, D. A., Flanagan, J. R., & Culham, J. C. (In press). Activity patterns in category-selective occipitotemporal cortex predict upcoming motor actions. European Journal of Neuroscience.
• Rossit, S. McAdam, T., McLean, D. A., Goodale, M. A., & Culham, J. C. (2013). fMRI reveals a lower visual field preference for hand actions in human superior-parietal occipital cortex (SPOC) and precuneus. Cortex.
• Milne, J.L., Chapman, C.S., Gallivan, J.P., Wood, D.K., Culham, J.C., & Goodale, M.A. (2013). Connecting the Dots: Object connectedness deceives perception but not movement. Psychological Science.
• Gallivan, J. P., McLean, D. A., Flanagan, J. R., & Culham, J. C. (2013). Where one hand meets the other: Limb-specific and goal-dependent movement plans decoded from preparatory signals in single human parieto-frontal brain areas. Journal of Neuroscience, 33(5), 1991-2008

October 2012:

• Jody is now serving as a Reviewing Editor at a new top-tier open access biosciences journal, eLife

August 2012:

• Congratulations to Joey Paciocco for successfully defending his M.Sc. thesis in Neuroscience.
• Welcome to Dr. Lucilla Cardinali, who joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow.  Lucilla did a Ph.D with Alessandro Farne at INSERM in Lyon, France.

April 2012 Recent Papers: 

• Hutchison, R. M., Gallivan, J. P., Culham, J. C., Gati, J. S., Menon, R. S., & Everling, S. (2012). Functional connectivity of the frontal eye fields in humans and macaque monkeys investigated with resting-state fMRI. Journal of Neurophysiology.
• Valyear, K. F., Gallivan, J. P., McLean, D. A. & Culham, J. C. (2012). fMRI repetition suppression for familiar but not arbitrary actions with tools. Journal of Neuroscience, 32(12), 4247-4259.

January 2012:

• Welcome to Dr. Michael Barnett-Cowan, who has joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow. Michael was previously a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen and did his Ph.D. with Laurence Harris at York.

January 2012 Recent Papers:

• Snow, J. C., Pettypiece, C., McAdam, T. D., McLean, A. D., Stroman, P. W., Goodale, M. A., & Culham, J. C. (2011). Bringing the real world into the fMRI scanner: Repetition effects for pictures versus real objects. Scientific Reports, 1, Article number 130.
• Gallivan, J. P., McLean, D. A., Smith, F. W., & Culham, J. C. (2011). Decoding effector-dependent and effector-independent movement intentions from human parieto-frontal brain activity. Journal of Neuroscience, 31(47), 17149-17168.
• Gallivan, J. P., McLean, D. A., & Culham, J. C. (2011). Neuroimaging reveals enhanced activation in a reach-selective brain area for objects located within participants' typical hand workspaces. Neuropsychologia, 49, 3710-3721.
• Secen, J. Culham, J., Ho, C., & Giaschi, D. (2011). Neural correlates of the multiple-object tracking deficit in amblyopia. Vision Research, 51(23-24), 2517-2527.
• Wood, D. K., Gallivan, J. P., Chapman, C. S., Milne, J. L., Culham, J. C. & Goodale, M. A. (2011). Visual salience dominates early visuomotor competition in reaching behavior. Journal of Vision, 11 (10):16, 1-11.

December 2011:

• Congratulations to Dr. Mark Daley, who successfully defended his M.Sc. thesis in Neuroscience.  Following his study leave to do the Master's, Mark resumed his position as Associate Professor in Computer Science.

November 2011:

• Welcome to Dr. Sara Fabbri, who joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow.  Sara did a Ph.D with Angelika Lingnau and Alfonso Caramazza at the University of Trento.

September 2011:

• Welcome to Scott Macdonald, a new Master's student in Neuroscience.  Scott did his bachelor's degree at Mount Allison with Dr. Genevieve Desmarais.

August 2011:

• Congratulations to Dr. Jason Gallivan, who successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis in Neuroscience. Jason will be doing a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Randy Flanagan at Queen's University.

June 2011 Recent Papers:

• Gallivan, J. P., McLean, D. A., Valyear, K.F., Pettypiece, C. E., & Culham, J. C. (2011). Decoding action intentions from preparatory brain activity in human parieto-frontal networks. Journal of Neuroscience, 31(26), 9610-9599.
• Valyear, K. F., Chapman, C. S., Gallivan, J. P., Mark, R. S., & Culham, J. C. (2011). To use or to move: Goal set modulates priming when grasping real tools. Experimental Brain Research, 212, 125-142.
• Gallivan, J. P., Chapman, C. S., Wood, D. K., Milne, J. L., Ansari, D., Culham, J. C., & Goodale, M. A. (2011, published online). One to four, and nothing more: Non-conscious parallel object individuation in action. Psychological Science. Published online before print May 11, 2011, doi: 10.1177/0956797611408733
• Chapman, C. S., Gallivan, J. P., Culham, J. C. & Goodale, M. A. (2011). Mental blocks: fMRI reveals top-down modulation of early visual cortex when obstacles interfere with grasp planning. Neuropsychologia, 49, 1703-1717.

June 2011:

• Congratulations to former PhD student Ken Valyear for winning the Governor General’s Gold Medal for outstanding academic achievement by a graduate student (one of two such awards at Western) and Collip Medal Award for outstanding PhD student graduating from a basic science program in the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry. 

December 2010:

• The Culham Lab moved to new facilities in the Brain and Mind Institute in the Natural Sciences Centre at Western

December 2010:

• Ken Valyear successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, "Perception meets action: fMRI and behavioural investigations of human tool use." He will be doing an NSERC-sponsored postdoctoral fellowship with Scott Frey at the University of Oregon. Congratulations Dr. Valyear!

November 2010:

• Jody appeared on the 35th anniversary show for Quirks & Quarks on CBC radio to discuss fMRI

June 2010:

• Jody Culham received an NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship. Read about it on Western News!

October 2009:

• Jody participated in a discussion panel "Who Am I?" for a "Science in the Pub" night at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute

November 2009:

• Our research was profiled in Western News.

October 2009 - Articles in press:

• Monaco, S., Kroliczak, G., Quinlan, D. J., Fattori, P., Galletti, C., Goodale, M.A., & Culham, J.C. (In press). Contribution of visual and proprioceptive information to the precision of reaching movements. Experimental Brain Research.
• Wong, Y., Aldcroft, A., Large, M.-E., Culham, J. & Vilis, T. (In press). The role of temporal synchrony as a binding cue for visual persistence in early visual areas: an fMRI study. Journal of Neurophysiology.
• Danckert, J. & Culham, J. C. (In press). Reflections on blindsight: Neuroimaging and behavioural exploration clarify a case of reversed localization in the blind field of a patient with hemianopia. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology.
• Barry, R. L., Williams, J. M., Klassen, L. M., Culham, J. C., & Menon, R. S. (In press). Preprocessing pipeline considerations to compensate for paradigm-related subject movement in BOLD functional MRI. Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
• Pettypiece, C. E., Goodale, M. A., & Culham, J. C. (In press). Integration of haptic and visual size cues in perception and action revealed through crossmodal conflict. Experimental Brain Research.
• April 2009 - Three new papers are in press:
• Pettypiece, C., Culham, J. C., & Goodale, M. A. (In press). Differential effects of delay upon visually and haptically guided grasping and perceptual judgments. Experimental Brain Research.
• Valyear, K. F. & Culham, J. C. (In press). Observing learned object-specific functional grasps preferentially activates the ventral stream. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
• Malfait, N., Valyear, K. F., Culham, J. C., Anton, J.-L., & Gribble, P. L. (In press). fMRI activation during observation of others' reach errors. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

January 2009 - A new paper is in press at Journal of Neuroscience:

• Gallivan, J. P., Cavina-Pratesi, C., & Culham, J. C. (In press). Is that within reach?: fMRI reveals that the human superior parieto-occipital cortex (SPOC) encodes objects reachable by the hand. Journal of Neuroscience.

A new paper is in press at Neuropsychologia:

• Cohen, N. R., Cross, E. S., Tunik, E., Grafton, S. T., & Culham, J. C. (2009). Ventral and dorsal stream contributions to the online control of immediate and delayed grasping: A TMS approach. Neuropsychologia.

September 2008 - A new paper is in press at Journal of Neurophysiology:

• Kroliczak, G., McAdam, T. D., Quinlan, D. J., & Culham, J. C. (In press). The human dorsal stream adapts to real actions and 3D shape processing: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Journal of Neurophysiology.
• Jody is off on sabbatical and heading to MIT & Harvard (for two weeks in Sept 2008), the University of Maastricht, Netherlands (Sept-Dec 2008), and the University of Bologna (Jan-May 2009).
• Charlie Pettypiece began his M.Sc. in Neuroscience, co-supervised by Jody Culham and Mel Goodale, after spending two years in the lab as an undergraduate research assistant and NSERC summer scholar.

August 2008:

• Congratulations to both Derek Quinlan and Yvonne Wong on successfully defending their Ph.D. theses! Derek will be working as a research project manager for Dr. Graham Reid at Western.
• We had our annual Culham Lab summer party
• The new Siemens 3T Tim Trio has arrived at Robarts. See Jody's photos and CFMM photos and updates (broken links).

November 2007:

• The highly productive but aged 4T at Robarts Research Institute is being decommissioned. We look forward to the arrival of a new Siemens 3T MRI scanner and a Varian 7T MRI scanner, estimated to arrive in the summer of 2008, once construction of the new MRI wing is completed.

July 2007:

• New pictures from this year's summer Lab BBQ have been posted in the Lab Photos section