Please feel free to contact me at with any questions. This allows us to interview not just other potential IMG candidates, but also opens our process up to candidates who are wanting to transfer from other programs as well as practicing clinicians who want to retrain in psychiatry. There are two IMG spots that are unmatched, and we will be going through the second iteration to have them filled. We are thrilled to inform you that we have done very well in our virtual CaRMS match! We have matched all our Canadian medical graduate positions, and I feel that the new incoming residents will be a great addition to our program and I am excited to have them join our psychiatry family. Irfan Khanbhai, Interim Program Director, Postgraduate Psychiatry Program *** The other is called fMRI-CPCA, which is a multivariate analysis method for imaging networks of brain activity. One is called metacognitive training (MCT), which is a group-based program that uses research-based examples to increase awareness of the cognitive biases that may underlie delusions, and training patients to counter these biases. His lab provides two applications for download, free of charge. The objectives of his functional neuroimaging research are to gain a functional and anatomical understanding of the cognitive systems involved in psychosis and schizophrenia, and to develop new multivariate methods for analyzing fMRI data, with applications to integrating information from fMRI, EEG and MEG. This is being explored by way of originally designed cognitive paradigms for memory confidence, source monitoring, reasoning, and semantic association. The objective of his cognitive neuropsychiatry research is to identify the cognitive operations underlying the primary symptoms of psychosis and schizophrenia. Todd Woodward’s research program is focused on two main areas of research: cognitive neuropsychiatry and functional neuroimaging. If such an approach is to be effective in the future, it should be combined with medication and treatments that target cognitive biases, such as metacognitive training or cognitive behavioural therapy, adding to the increasing options for treatments for people with schizophrenia.Īs director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Schizophrenia (CNoS) Laboratory, Dr. The brain networks associated with delusions/certainty/doubt are candidate targets for non-invasive neuromodulation/neurostimulation treatments such as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).
This was the first study to examine task-based functional network activity in patients with schizophrenia experiencing and not experiencing delusions during a single-trial probabilistic reasoning task.Among the four networks identified, a visual attention network appears to play an important role in delusions.
These results suggest that activity in this brain network, which is normally strongly elicited under conditions of weak evidence, is reduced for people with schizophrenia experiencing delusions. The spatiotemporal features suggested involvement in early visual attention, and activation showed no difference between weak- and strong-match conditions for patients experiencing delusions. Woodward’s team identified activity in a brain network involved in gathering information under conditions of weak versus strong evidence to observe impairment in delusions in schizophrenia.
Woodward states, “Multiple generations of committed lab members contributed to this work.”ĭelusions in schizophrenia are false beliefs that are assigned certainty and not afforded the scrutiny that normally gives rise to doubt, even under conditions of weak evidence. Todd Woodward and his research team reveal that, in people with schizophrenia experiencing delusions, these delusions manifest in fMRI as reduced activity in an early visual attentional process whereby weak evidence is incorrectly stamped as conclusive - short-circuiting the search for evidence. New findings published earlier this month ( Functional brain networks underlying probabilistic reasoning and delusions in schizophrenia, Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging) by Dr.