Cognition seminars

Shantanu Jadhav presents work on coordinated hippocampal-prefrontal activity and the neural mechanisms that support memory-guided cognition and decisions. The seminar draws on systems electrophysiology and circuit analysis to connect distributed network dynamics with behavior.

Takaki Komiyama will discuss how cortical circuits maintain information about the value of behavioral options across trials and transform past experience into future choices. The talk draws on longitudinal imaging and circuit manipulation in mice to examine distinct neuronal populations and local and long-range interactions in history-dependent decision-making.

Navigation and memory require coordination between map-like allocentric representations and body-centered egocentric actions. Aaron Wilber examines how the parietal–retrosplenial–anterior thalamic–hippocampal network performs these transformations, and how disrupted coordination contributes to spatial deficits in aging and Alzheimer’s disease. Rat sequence-task experiments reveal bidirectional hippocampal–parietal interactions across route-centered, place and egocentric representations. Because that task does not isolate reference-frame use, the laboratory developed a freely available task separating egocentric, allocentric and transformation conditions. Validation indicates that parietal cortex and anterior thalamus are required for transformation; ongoing work examines population states associated with each condition. The talk then connects impaired hippocampal–cortical communication during sleep to navigation deficits in 3xTg-AD mice, reporting recovery of circuit function and cognition after early, circuit-targeted 40 Hz entrainment. Related investigations examine this network during waking navigation. In TgF344-AD rats, egocentric impairments appear before transformation deficits, addressing the shortage of rodent studies of reference-frame coordination in Alzheimer’s disease.

Bryce Mander presents research on early sleep biomarkers associated with Alzheimer's disease pathophysiology and memory impairment. The William C. Dement Seminar connects sleep and circadian neuroscience with neurodegeneration, cognition and clinically relevant approaches to detecting disease-related change.

Daphna Shohamy and Ashok Litwin-Kumar bridge experimental and computational neuroscience to explain how the brain assigns significance to memories, how dopamine shapes memory-guided decisions, and how bodily signals influence learning. Isabel Low moderates a public discussion and question session.

Although stress can be considered as an ongoing process that helps an organism to cope with present and future challenges, when it is too intense or uncontrollable, it can lead to adverse consequences for physical and mental health. Social stress specifically, is a highly prevalent traumatic experience, present in multiple contexts, such as war, bullying and interpersonal violence, and it has been linked with increased risk for major depression and anxiety disorders. Nevertheless, not all individuals exposed to strong stressful events develop psychopathology, with the mechanisms of resilience and vulnerability being still under investigation. During this talk, I will identify key gaps in our knowledge about stress vulnerability and I will present our recent data from our contextual fear learning protocol based on social defeat stress in mice.

Traditionally, touch is associated with exteroception and is rarely considered a relevant sensory cue for controlling movements in space, unlike vision. We developed a technique to isolate and measure tactile involvement in controlling sliding finger movements over a surface. Young adults traced a 2D shape with their index finger under direct or mirror-reversed visual feedback to create a conflict between visual and somatosensory inputs. In this context, increased reliance on somatosensory input compromises movement accuracy. Based on the hypothesis that tactile cues contribute to guiding hand movements when in contact with a surface, we predicted poorer performance when the participants traced with their bare finger compared to when their tactile sensation was dampened by a smooth, rigid finger splint. The results supported this prediction. EEG source analyses revealed smaller current in the source-localized somatosensory cortex during sensory conflict when the finger directly touched the surface. This finding supports the hypothesis that, in response to mirror-reversed visual feedback, the central nervous system selectively gated task-irrelevant somatosensory inputs, thereby mitigating, though not entirely resolving, the visuo-somatosensory conflict. Together, our results emphasize touch’s involvement in movement control over a surface, challenging the notion that vision predominantly governs goal-directed hand or finger movements.

Accurate perception of the environment is a constructive process that requires integration of external bottom-up sensory signals with internally-generated top-down information reflecting past experiences and current aims. Decades of work have elucidated how sensory neocortex processes physical stimulus features. In contrast, examining how memory-related-top-down information is encoded and integrated with bottom-up signals has long been challenging. Here, I will discuss our recent work pinpointing the outermost layer 1 of neocortex as a central hotspot for processing of experience-dependent top-down information threat during perception, one of the most fundamentally important forms of sensation.

We developed a novel paradigm measuring implicit identity recognition using Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation (FPVS) with EEG among 16 students and 12 police officers with normal face processing abilities. Participants' neural responses to a 1-Hz tagged oddball identity embedded within a 6-Hz image stream revealed implicit recognition with high-quality mugshots but not CCTV-like images, suggesting optimal resolution requirements. Our findings extend previous research by demonstrating that even unfamiliar identities can elicit robust neural recognition signatures through brief, repeated passive exposure. This approach offers potential for objective validation of face processing abilities in forensic applications, including assessment of facial examiners, Super-Recognisers, and eyewitnesses, potentially overcoming limitations of traditional behavioral assessment methods.

Join Us for the Memory Decoding Journal Club! A collaboration of the Carboncopies Foundation and BPF Aspirational Neuroscience. This time, we’re diving into a groundbreaking paper: "Motor learning selectively strengthens cortical and striatal synapses of motor engram neurons

Facial expressions are inherently dynamic, and our visual system is sensitive to subtle changes in their temporal sequence. However, researchers often use dynamic morphs of photographs—simplified, linear representations of motion—to study the neural correlates of dynamic face perception. To explore the brain's sensitivity to natural facial motion, we constructed a novel dynamic face database using generative neural networks, trained on a verified set of video-recorded emotional expressions. The resulting deepfakes, consciously indistinguishable from videos, enabled us to separate biological motion from photorealistic form. Results showed that conventional dynamic morphs elicit distinct responses in the brain compared to videos and photos, suggesting they violate expectations (n400) and have reduced social salience (late positive potential). This suggests that dynamic morphs misrepresent facial dynamism, resulting in misleading insights about the neural and behavioural correlates of face perception. Deepfakes and videos elicited largely similar neural responses, suggesting they could be used as a proxy for real faces in vision research, where video recordings cannot be experimentally manipulated. And yet, despite being consciously undetectable as fake, deepfakes elicited an expectation violation response in the brain. This points to a neural sensitivity to naturalistic facial motion, beyond conscious awareness. Despite some differences in neural responses, the realism and manipulability of deepfakes make them a valuable asset for research where videos are unfeasible. Using these stimuli, we proposed a novel marker for the conscious perception of naturalistic facial motion – Frontal delta activity – which was elevated for videos and deepfakes, but not for photos or dynamic morphs.

Over the past thirty years or so, cognitive neuroscience has made spectacular progress understanding the biological mechanisms of consciousness. Consciousness science, as this field is now sometimes called, was not only inexistent thirty years ago, but its very name seemed like an oxymoron: how can there be a science of consciousness? And yet, despite this scepticism, we are now equipped with a rich set of sophisticated behavioural paradigms, with an impressive array of techniques making it possible to see the brain in action, and with an ever-growing collection of theories and speculations about the putative biological mechanisms through which information processing becomes conscious. This is all good and fine, even promising, but we also seem to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, or at least to have forgotten it in the crib: consciousness is not just mechanisms, it’s what it feels like. In other words, while we know thousands of informative studies about access-consciousness, we have little in the way of phenomenal consciousness. But that — what it feels like — is truly what “consciousness” is about. Understanding why it feels like something to be me and nothing (panpsychists notwithstanding) for a stone to be a stone is what the field has always been after. However, while it is relatively easy to study access-consciousness through the contrastive approach applied to reports, it is much less clear how to study phenomenology, its structure and its function. Here, I first overview work on what consciousness does (the "how"). Next, I ask what difference feeling things makes and what function phenomenology might play. I argue that subjective experience has intrinsic value and plays a functional role in everything that we do.