Mengsi Li presented her work titled “Functional Organization of Lateral Prefrontal Cortex during Time-Emotion Integration” and Joanne Stasiak presented her work titled “Integrated representations of threat and action control in the human frontal pole” at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience held in Chicago, IL.
Lapate elected a Fellow of the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
Dr. Lapate was elected a Fellow of the UC Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (CNLM). CNLM Fellows, who are nominated and elected by CNLM members, represent one of the world’s top think tanks in neuroscience who are “revolutionizing our understanding of the brain and its disorders, creating innovative neurotechnologies, and improving brain health on a global scale.” Congratulations Dr. Lapate!
New TMS system is setup!
The lab recently welcomed experts from Magstim and Brainsight to install and provide training on our new transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) system.
Mengsi’s study on retrospective emotion and temporal memory published in Emotion!
Mengsi Li’s new work on retrospective emotion biases and temporal memory was accepted in Emotion! This work, titled ‘The emotion filmmaker: Temporal memory, time–emotion integration, and affective style’ examined whether well documented biases in retrospective emotion (such as peak-end effects; Fredrickson & Kahneman 1993) are related to intra- and inter-individual variation in temporal memory capacity. We also examined whether trait-like individual differences in emotional functioning (such as mood and anxiety disorder symptoms) were related to retrospective emotion or temporal memory processes.
Check out this work here:
Welcome Sydney Fortner!
Sydney joins the LEAP Neuro lab from Dartmouth College (‘24) where she earned a BA in Neuroscience and Anthropology and studied face perception. In the LEAP Neuro lab, Sydney will work on fMRI projects examining temporal coding of emotional experiences. Welcome Sydney–we are thrilled to have you!
Mengsi attends the Timing Research Forum Summer School in Greece
Mengsi Li was selected to attend the Timing Research Forum (TRF) Summer School in Chios, Greece. There, multidisciplinary teams from psychology, neuroscience, robotics, and computational sciences joined forces to meet the challenges of studying time perception and advance our knowledge on timing. Congratulations, Mengsi!
Lapate gives talk at the Neurobiology of Cognition Gordon Research Conference
Dr. Lapate gave an invited talk, titled "Time and Emotion Integration in the Lateral Prefrontal Cortex” at the Neurobiology of Cognition Gordon Research Conference in New Hampshire.
Runan Wang off to start her PhD at UMiami
Runan Wang, who started in the LEAP Neuro lab as an undergraduate assistant in 2021 and stayed as a lab manager for the past 2 years, will now start graduate school in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Miami, where she will be working with Dr. Aaron Heller. Congratulations, Runan–we will miss you!
Lapate awarded Academic Senate grant
Dr. Lapate was awarded an Academic Senate grant for 2024-2024, which will support a new project in the lab on anticipatory anxiety, cognitive control and metacognition led by graduate student Nadu Barbashova.
Mengsi awarded UCSB Doctoral student travel award
Mengsi Li was awarded a UCSB’s Doctoral student travel award to support her travel to the 1st Timing Research Forum Summer School to be held in Chios, Greece. Congratulations, Mengsi!
Congratulations to LEAP Neuro lab’s graduating seniors!
Congratulations to our wonderful RAs Ana Nakamura, Izzy Wang, Kasey Bohney, Jeevika Adda, Chloe Swoiskin, Jasmine Diaz (Gene and Susan Lucas Grant, Distinction in major), Tori LeVier (Frances Colville and Terry Dearborn Memorial Award), Reicher Bergstein, Leah Winter, and Cambell Ingram on their graduation from UCSB in the class of 2024!
Lapate awarded UC Hellman fellowship
Dr. Lapate was awarded a Hellman grant! The Hellman fellowship provides research funding to promising assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their chosen fields. This award will support a new dense-sampling study of positive and negative emotional memories–the Life of Memories (LiME) Project– led by Mengsi Li in collaboration with Nadu Barbashova, Runan Wang, and others in the lab. Stay tuned for more!
Lapate’s TMS + fMRI study published in Nature Communications
Dr. Lapate’s work examining lateral prefrontal (LPFC) function and emotional processing was published in Nature Communications. In this work, we asked whether LPFC causally promotes goal-directed behavior during emotional processing. To answer this question, we combined individualized TMS targeting with fMRI/MVPA obtained during a task that requires cognitive control as a function of affective signals, the Affective Go/NoGo (AGNG) task. We targeted LPFC w/ TMS (a putatively inhibitory protocol, cTBS) based on the individualized location of multivariate action-goal representations during the AGNG task, which was followed by fMRI scanning. We found that individualized cTBS to mid-LPFC (vs. a Control site) reduced action-goal information in mid-LPFC and impaired goal-oriented action (i.e. task performance), particularly during the processing of negative emotional cues. We also found that cTBS to mid-LPFC reduced the functional coupling between mid-LPFC and DMN nodes, including frontopolar cortex, which in turn correlated with the strength of LPFC action-goal signals.
Check out the work here:
LEAP Neuro lab presents at CNS
Joanne Stasiak and Jingyi Wang present their work at at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) in Toronto, Canada. Nadu Barbashova also attended and highlighted the coolest findings on CNS’ social media.
Welcome Christina Villanueva!
Christina joins us after a year working on our ASAP emotion-motor project in collaboration with Dr. Grafton. Christina brings with her phenomenal experience and expertise on running complex fMRI-psychophysiological sessions and helping to manage large longitudinal projects. We are thrilled to have you, Christina!
The LEAP Neuro lab awarded Institute for Biotechnology grant
Dr Lapate’s and the LEAP Neuro lab’s research was awarded a grant by the Army Research Office (ARO) and the UCSB-Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies cooperative agreement (2024-2028) for the project titled: ‘Dynamic Interactions of Emotional States, Temporal Coding and Memory’. This award will support new TMS +fMRI work from the lab on whether and how emotional states change temporal coding, and will also test a causal intervention that may enhance the temporal precision of episodic memory under stressful situations. This work is led by Dr. Jingyi Wang in collaboration with Mengsi Li. Congratulations, team!
Joanne’s work selected as conference highlight at CNS
Joanne’s Stasiak work titled “Lateral frontal pole tracks emotion metacognitive assessments during anticipatory threat” was selected to be featured as a conference highlight at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) to be held in Toronto, Canada. Congratulations, Joanne!