I’ve decided to work on and post one (very) rough draft of each subchapter of my PhD thesis at a time, so that I can focus on just one part at a time without being distracted by the rest of it. I also find that I write best when writing for an immediate audience. Please feel free to ask any questions and give comments as I go along. I’ll start with the Table of Contents. As you can see, I’m experimenting with a Socratic/question-based approach to chapter organization:
Tentative title: Reactivation of Visual Representations With Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
- Introduction:
- What is this thesis about?
- What are the contributions of this work?
- How is this thesis structured?
- Background: TMS and visual cortex
- What do we already know about how information is represented in visual cortex?
- What is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)?
- What does TMS offer us that other techniques do not?
- What is already known about how TMS interacts with representations in visual cortex?
- What can we learn from TMS reactivation of visual representations?
- Related work: Prior experiments with reactivation and related effects
- What related experiments were previously performed by Daw-An Wu and Juha Silvanto?
- How does the work described in this thesis build upon earlier work?
- Chapter: Replay of natural images
- How do you invoke the TMS-based visual replay effect?
- What was the methodology used for the natural image replay experiments?
- What do subjects report seeing when the replay effect is elicited?
- What are the implications of the figure-ground segregation reported by many subjects during replay?
- What is the timecourse of the visual replay effect?
- What do the effects of switching current direction in the coil tell us about the nature of the replay effect?
- What can we determine about what regions of cortex are being stimulated during visual replay?
- Chapter: Replaying visual masks
- What is visual masking?
- What can the replay of visual masks tell us about what is happening during replay?
- How did we replay visual masks?
- What happened when we replayed visual masks?
- What does the interaction between replay and visual masking tell us about the representation which gets reactivated?
- Chapter: entrainment effect and masking paradigm
- What is the entrainment effect?
- Chapter: retrieval?
- Chapter: Contributions and future work
- Contributions
- Future work
How’s it going so far? I’ll definitely read things as you post them.
Grade A stuff. I’m uunqsetoinably in your debt.