Behavioral Neuroscience ePosters

Cognitive flexibility is characterized by the ability to adapt behavior in response to changing environments. When the environment changes, previously appropriate behavior can lead to negative feedback. Surprising negative feedback – failure to receive a reward when strongly expected – may signal a change in the…

Perceptual decision-making involves interpreting sensory information to guide actions. Incoming sensory information must often be assessed in the context of other relevant information held in working memory. Despite this interdependence, the neural basis of working memory and perceptual decision-making have largely…

The internal compass of the brain, also known as the head-direction (HD) system, forms a crucial component of the neural circuit necessary for effective spatial orientation, and includes regions such as the anterodorsal thalamic nucleus (ADN). It maintains a sense of orientation by integrating self-motion with local…

Neuronal activity in the primate superior colliculus (SC) is modulated by physical salience, reward value, and attention, but how these signals are integrated remains unknown. One hypothesis is that SC activity reflects a unified “priority map” of the visual field. However, it is unclear how a unified priority map…

Because the world is dynamic and only imperfectly observable, many of the decisions we make are necessarily uncertain. How do we navigate such uncertainty? From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, the classic answer would be that we evaluate the benefits of each potential choice and then lean towards the one…

Juvenile male zebra finches learn to produce a single, highly stereotyped song and maintain this song over the course of their adult lives using auditory feedback. Much of what we know of the underlying learning process comes from studies of adult male zebra finches adapting to white noise feedback triggered by either…

Odor naming is considered as a particularly challenging task. In free odor naming scenarios people often fail to respond with any linguistic label to certain odors they smell, resulting in what is called an omission (i.e., a lack of response). The cognitive demands and the nature of interactions between olfaction and…

Dopamine plays a crucial role in the neural mechanisms underlying behavior, yet quantifying its impact through genetic modifications presents significant challenges, particularly due to the high-dimensional nature of the resulting data. In this study, we address these challenges by proposing a novel methodological…

Exploring the origins of animal and human behavior within cortical circuits remains a puzzle awaiting resolution. It is established that when animals and humans compare two stimuli (d1 and d2) separated by a delay interval (Fig. 1a), their perception is influenced by a perceptual bias, characterized by a contraction…

It is appealing to disclose the state of an animal as well as the functional connectivity of its neuronal circuit by calculating pairwise and higher-order interactions (HOI) among neuronal activity. Here, we present a systematic approach to achieve these goals by analysing the spiking activity of simultaneously…

The stability of the relationship between neural activity and external variables is a matter of debate for many brain areas [1-5]. Whether neural representations are stable or "drifting" has significant implications for how downstream neural populations process these representations and incorporate them into…

The role of sensory systems is to interpret real-world events to facilitate behavior. For instance, the visual system enacts compensatory eye movements based on a global motion representation, generated by combining local motion signals from the retina. However, due to the aperture problem, local motion signals are…

Perception requires integrating noisy dynamic visual information across the visual field to identify relevant stimuli and guide decisions. While temporal integration has been studied extensively in experiments with highly controlled visual stimuli and reverse-correlation techniques, the nonlinear mechanisms underlying…

Neural networks need to continuously adapt their representations to survive in a constantly changing environment. To test behavioral flexibility reversal learning paradigms are often used [1]. This flexible adaptation of entrained representations can be mediated by unlearning and forgetting [2]. One possible factor…

A key function of the brain is to process noisy sensory stimuli to make fast and accurate decisions. Canonical studies manipulate average noise to study stimulus effects on decision parameters, but how processing of exact stochastic fluctuations impacts the decision outcome, has remained largely unexplored. We…

Experimental studies have demonstrated that spontaneous task-independent replay of sequences encoding a learned route during sharp-wave–ripple (SWR) events can be beneficial for consolidating path memory [1] and discovering new behavioral strategies, such as forming novel space-action representations, finding…

Animals continuously merge information across their senses, and use these combined signals to guide their behaviour. In the brain, these multisensory computations are performed by circuits rich with complex connections like skips [1] - bypassing certain layers, and feedback pathways which allow information to flow…

The ability to robustly recognize strings of letters, a cornerstone of reading, was observed in Baboons and Pigeons despite their lack of phonological and semantic knowledge. Here, we apply a comparative modeling approach to investigate the neuro-cognitive basis of Human, Baboon, and Pigeon orthographic decision…

The mammalian neuronal activity during sleep consists of two main states: non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM), also called slow-wave, and rapid-eye-movement (REM), also called active or paradoxical. The mechanisms underlying this ultradian sleep rhythm are not well understood but likely depend on reciprocal interactions…

Our understanding of the hippocampus has been framed by two landmark discoveries: the discovery by Scoville and Milner that hippocampal damage causes profound and persistent amnesia and the discovery by O’Keefe and Dostrovsky of hippocampal place cells in rodents. However, it has been unclear to what extent spatial…

Understanding the neural basis of animal behavior is a central challenge in biology. In this work, we establish a connection between the spatio-temporal decision-making processes of animals and the ring attractor dynamics of neurons, which determine the organism's heading direction. We formulate a neural field model…

Throughout each day the brain captures snapshots of distinct experiences, forming episodic memories that often last a lifetime. This function depends on the hippocampus – a brain region that is evolutionarily conserved across vertebrates. My lab studies the relationship between hippocampal activity and episodic memory…

Locomotion involves the precise coordination of different body parts. On structured surfaces, animals additionally have to adapt their gait to properties of the environment. To study the dynamical principles of locomotor learning in novel environments, we trained mice to walk on a motorized treadmill with evenly…

Understanding how neuronal populations interact to process information and generate behaviour is a central goal of neuroscience. This can be challenging due to the high dimensionality of the neuronal populations, the dense interactions between them and the unobserved factors that influence the dynamics. The neuronal…