"Brain Scan” Tours --
University of California Berkeley

Take this special opportunity, for Learning & the Brain participants only, to see an fMRI brain scan in action. Find out what is being learned from brain scans. One volunteer from each tour group will be selected for the live scan of his/her own working brain, to be viewed by the group.

Times: Wednesday, Feb. 17 at
2:00 PM or 3:00 PM
(Tours are for one hour)
Lab Tours: Cognitive Control Lab or Social Cognition Lab
Fee: $120 per person
Tours are limited to 10 per tour.
If you are interested, please sign up early.

Take this unique opportunity, for Learning and the Brain Conference attendees only, to tour the Laboratory for Cognitive Control and Development or the Social Cognition labs at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, located at the University of California at Berkeley.

There are two options available: one has an emphasis on cognitive control and the other focuses on behavioral testing. Both tours will get the exciting chance to see an fMRI brain scan in action. One volunteer from each tour group will be selected for the live scan of his or her own brain to be viewed by the group.

Tour Option #1 – Cognitive Control and Development Laboratory
For the cognitive control option, participants will get a tour of a typical neuroscience lab in Barker Hall. Attendees will first start with the MRI portion and view reasoning tasks that are important for intelligence developed by the lab to induce activation in select prefrontal areas. Then, the tour will move to Barker Hall where the researchers investigate the neural mechanisms that allow us to reason about the world around us and to pursue our goals in it. We meet to discuss experiments, run behavioral studies, and analyze data from the MRI scanner and other sources. This tour will focus on the different aspects of cognitive control and how we study them with respect to the aging process of the developing brain from childhood to adulthood.

Tour Option #2 – Relationships and Social Cognition Laboratory
The psychology option will include a tour of a typical social-personality psychology research lab in Tolman Hall. Tour leaders will describe research pursuits related to delay of gratification in children, which is associated with long-term developmental outcomes and academic achievement. Attendees will be shown footage of a typical delay of gratification task and will be presented with and try out the Behavioral Risk Analogue Task or BART (Lejuez et al., 2002), which was developed as a measure of behavioral risk taking and is potentially related to delay of gratification performance. Attendees will then move to the Brain Imaging Center where tour leaders will demonstrate the Shrek Go-No-Go task which assesses response inhibition, also purportedly related to delay of gratification performance.

Register:
To register, please call 781-449-4010 ext. 101. The full fee must be paid in advance by check or credit card. We regret that purchase orders cannot be accepted for this tour. Attendees will need to sign a health consent form for the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.

Volunteer for the Brain Scan:
If you would like to volunteer for having your brain scanned, please indicate your interest when you call to register. You will be sent an MRI screening questionnaire from the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, which will include personal questions about your health. The lab's researchers will be responsible for selecting the volunteer for the actual brain scan from each tour group. If you are selected, you will be asked to sign consent forms.

Location:
The Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute is located walking distance from the Downtown Berkeley BART station, which is accessible from the hotel in San Francisco where the conference will take place. Walking directions will be provided to you in advance of the tour.

For further information or to register, please call 781-449-4010 ext. 101.