Daniel Glaser: Ongoing scientific projects

Dancers' brains

In collaboration with Julie Grèzes, Patrick Haggard, Beatriz Calvo and Dick Passingham from ICN and FIL. More properly called action observation by movement experts, we are looking at how what you can do affects how you see. This work is also in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Tom Sapsford, who I met at the futurephysical.org bio-tech network exchange. The work was presented in a Neuroscience 2003 poster. You could also read the abstract.

Read more about the project at Nova Sciencenow.

How many vs. how much

In collaboration with Fulvia Castelli and Brian Butterworth from ICN. We are looking at numerosity estimation which is the ability to count non-symbolically. Fulvia came up with a digital analogue response task (DART) which we developed into an imaging experiment. Using this we are asking whether there are regions of the brain which care more about 'How many' things there are than 'How much' stuff there is. You can read an abstract.

Imaging methods

As part of the methods group at the FIL I am working with Karl Friston, Will Penny, Stefan Kiebel and Rik Henson. I am involved with development of SPM, a widely used analysis program for fMRI data. On the website you can find links to papers. I also have a position as Imaging Neuroscientist on an MRC Co-operative grant which involves me in various small-scale collaborations within the ICN.

Brainjuicer

I have been working with John Kearon from brainjuicer.com on an investigation of the collective unconscious using an adapted version of his online market research tool. It plays a simple word association game and responds with what it has gleaned from previous interactions. There is a poster describing some of the thinking about it.

We also used the tool in an experiment at the ICA in collaboration with Helene Joffe from UCL. We used various catastrophic images and measured people's reponses to them using skin conductance and free association techniques. You can look at the images and results, but note that there are some unpleasant and gory news pictures in the sequence.

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