SDSU Imaging Center

Neurocognitive Deficits and Compensation in Binge Drinkers
[NIH/NIAAA - R21 AA027371 (08/2019 - 07/2021)]
The overall aim of this project is to use a multimodal MRI approach to examine functional indices and structural correlates of executive deficits and compensatory mechanisms in young adult men and women engaging in binge drinking. Combined with a rich set of drinking indices, dispositional measures and behavioral variables, a constellation of brain measures will provide a mechanistic insight into the neural degradation underlying altered activity and brain reorganization.

Actively Recruiting Participants

If you are interested in participating in this study please contact Dr. Ksenija Markinkovic and her associates at psych.stbil@sdsu.edu

Neural Mechanisms of Risk and Resilience in Early Childhood Irritability
[NIH/NIMH - R01 MH121385 (9/1/2020-6/30/2025)]
The aim of this project is to identify reward and inhibition-related neural pathways that characterize persistence vs. remission of early child irriatability and may be targets for future novel preventive efforts.

Neural Tuning of the Reading System
[NSF/Cognitive Neuroscience Program - BCS-1756403]
This project uses neural tuning paradigms to identify the stimulus-based and experience -based factors that shape the brain's response to orthographic stimuli. In particular, we compare deaf and hearing readers (matched for reading skill) to determine how neural tuning gradients in ventral occipitotemporal and inferior frontal cortices are impacted by phonological knowledge, sensory experience, and reading task.

Lanugage, Modality, and the Brain
[NIH/National Insitiute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) - R01 DC010997]
One goal of this project is to investigate the neural coupling between production and perception for a visual-manual language, using an fMRI rapid adaptation paradigm. Another goal is to develop a sign language "localizer" to functionally identify language-relevant regions of interest (ROIs) in individual signers.

Glassy Carbon Micoelectrodes
[Center for NeuroTechnology (CNT): NSF Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (EEC-1028725)]
The aim of the project is to study the magnetic resonance compatibility of glassy carbon (GC) microelectrodes. Through induced-vibration, induced-voltage, and MR imaging experiments and finite element modeling, we compared the performances of these GC microelectrodes against those of conventional thin-film platinum (Pt) microelectrodes and established that GC microelectrodes demonstrate superior magnetic resonance compatibility. Specifically, we demonstrated that GC microelectrodes experienced no considerable vibration deflection amplitudes and minimal induced currents, while Pt microelectrodes had significantly larger currents. We showed that because of their low magnetic susceptibility and lower conductivity, the GC microelectrodes caused almost no susceptibility shift artifacts and no eddy-current-induced artifacts compared to Pt microelectrodes.