The University of Missouri-Rolla psychology department will host a guest lecturer from Washington University on April 27.
Dr. Steve Petersen, James S. McDonnell Professor of neurology at Washington University in St. Louis and director, of the university’s Division of Neuropsychology will speak on “What Can Generating Verbs Tell Us About Cognition and the Brain: 20 years of Petting Dogs and Eating Cake” from 3:30-5 p.m. Thursday, April 27, in Room 125 Butler-Carlton Civil Engineering Building. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Petersen’s research focuses on two related issues – the development of neural mechanisms underlying complex cognition, particularly language; and identifying and characterizing brain activity related to task organization and executive control. Petersen and his colleagues have demonstrated that specific regions in the frontal cortex are involved when people have to process the meaning of words, and that processing in visual regions of the brain can be changed by encouraging people to attend to different aspects of a stimulus, such as its color or motion.
For more information on the lecture, contact the UMR psychology department at (573) 341-4956.