Getting Started

About two months have passed since I began my career as a graduate student, and the time has come to begin applying for scholarships, and to start deciding on a thesis project.

Creating a thesis project that is both interesting and likely to be completed within two years is a difficult feat. Combining a supervisor's vision, along with your own ideas and capabilities, only adds to the difficulty. Thus, as this is a creative process, for the next few blog posts, I have decided to highlight some of the papers that I have been reading for thesis inspiration.

When I first started in the Multisensory Systems Neuroscience Laboratory at York in January 2012, I created a literature review for a lab project looking at the Inferior Frontal Junction, an area involved in the inhibition of external stimuli during a cognitive paradigm, such as the infamous Stroop Task. I thought about perhaps incorporating the knowledge I have gained about this functional area in the brain, in to my own research. I haven't quite figured out yet how to go about doing this, however here is a very interesting paper I came across, looking at the Inferior Frontal Gyrus (right by the IFJ), while trying to doing so.

"Functional Mechanisms involved in the internal inhibition of taboo words" was written by Severens, Kuhn, Hartsuiker, and Brass, in 2012, and was published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN). This paper looked at the mechanisms that prevent adults from speaking inappropriately in social situations. Researchers wanted to know whether the neural mechanisms behind this were the same as those found in the inhibition of neutral behaviors, and if not, what were the additional components regulating this behavior.

Past research has shown that the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) is activated during the stopping of manual, and verbal responses in stop-signal paradigms. The authors differentiated between endogenous self-control (inhibition of a response from within, without an external cue), and externally guided inhibition (with an external cue, such as an auditory cue in the stop-signal response task). They suggest that these two different types of inhibition activate different areas in the brain, with endogenous self-control activating the dorsal fronto-median cortex (dMFC) and externally guided inhibition activating the rIFG.

Thus, in their experiment, they examined whether inhibition of taboo words activated the rIFG, or the dFMC through the use of the SLIP task, in which taboo spoonerisms are induced in participants. A spoonerism occurs when an individual exchanges the first phonemes of word pairs (i.e. Mad Dash - Dad Mash), and experimenters were able to induce this phenomenon in 17 participants.

The results of the experiment demonstrated stronger activation in the rIFG vs. no activation in the dMFC between taboo-eliciting spoonerism trials vs. neutral spoonerisms, suggesting that the rIFG is involved in the inhibition of taboo words, just as it is involved in the inhibition of socially neutral stimuli.

I found this article easy to read, however I would have liked to see some numerical data, or some graphs - the only figures that were included were a task diagram and an anatomically landmarked brain for the rIFG. I think it would be very interesting to replicate this experiment with a focus on the inferior frontal junction rather the the gyrus. There is no distinction in the literature between the IFJ and the IFG - it seems as though both areas of the brain perform the same action. It would be interesting to find a way to differentiate between the two regions, to determine whether they are in fact two functionally distinct nodes in the inhibition circuitry in the brain.

Now for more inspiration.....