Read Montague presented a talk at “Interpreting BOLD: a dialogue between cognitive and cellular neuroscience,” a scientific meeting sponsored by The Royal Society in London.

The Royal Society is an independent scientific academy of the United Kingdom, dedicated to promoting excellence in science. This specific scientific meeting was focused on the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure blood oxygen levels. The process is known as BOLD.

Montague’s talk was titled, “Model-based approaches connecting BOLD and dopaminergic transmission in humans.” He discussed potential ways to analyze connections between BOLD measurements and transmissions of dopamine in humans. Montague recently published measurements of dopamine release with unprecedented temporal precision in the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease. Rapid dopamine release, such as the transmissions made while individuals play an investment game, encode information crucial for human choice.

Montague is the director of both the Computational Psychiatry Unit and the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.