Electrophysiology ePosters

Current electrophysiological approaches can track the activity of many neurons, yet it is usually unknown which cell-types or brain areas are being recorded without further molecular or histological analysis. Developing accurate and scalable algorithms for identifying the cell-type and brain region of recorded neurons…

Spatial navigation relies on external cues, such as visual objects, to anchor internal representations of space. In rodents, moving a visual landmark results in a corresponding shift in the tuning of head direction (HD) cells1. However, little is known about where visual objects are encoded in the mouse brain2 or how…

Many animals use visual motion cues to track and pursue small, fast-moving prey or to track conspecifics. The pursuit of small visual targets is a hard problem and understanding the underlying neural circuits will inform similar studies in other animals and open avenues for bio-inspired robotics. In dragonflies and…

Electrophysiological recordings capture signals from hundreds of neurons simultaneously, but isolating single-cell activity often requires manual curation due to limitations in spike- sorting algorithms. As dataset sizes grow, the time and expertise required for accurate and consistent human curation pose a major…

Understanding how the brain encodes movements is vital for motor control. Research suggests that this involves comparing proprioceptive inputs from the body with an internal model of expected movement. When these signals match, vestibular signals---which would otherwise stabilize the head against movements---are…

Latent dynamical system (LDS) models have been widely used to characterize the dynamics of high-dimensional neural population activity. However, these models typically ignore the fact that the brain contains multiple cell types. This limits their ability to capture the functional roles of distinct cell classes, and…

Traveling waves (TWs) in the brain are a form of neural synchrony. They have been observed across various regions, including the visual cortex and hippocampus, during both spontaneous and task-related activities. These waves are believed to play crucial roles in cognitive processes such as sensory perception and…

To understand the neural basis of many cognitive processes, such as learning and memory, we need to track the millisecond, single-spike activity of neurons across days. However, compared to calcium imaging methods, tracking neurons in chronic electrophysiological recordings remains challenging. Recent studies have…

Higher brain regions are thought to use the computational advantages of sitting closer to a critical point to support more complex cognitive functions. Finding evidence for this hypothesis from neural data is challenging, requiring robust and accurate measures of the distance to criticality (DTC). Many existing…

The sound structures that convey meaning in speech such as phonemes and words vary widely in their duration. As a consequence, integrating across absolute time (e.g., 100 ms) and sound structure (e.g., phonemes) reflect fundamentally distinct neural computations. Auditory and cognitive models have often cast neural…

Memory-related computations must occur across various brain states, each characterized by distinct oscillatory patterns. Theta oscillations in the hippocampal CA1 region are prominent during movement and are thought to organize network computations during active exploration, such as the virtual spatial paths formed by…

How the activity of sensory neurons supports perceptual decisions remains one of the central questions of systems neuroscience. Two primary frameworks guide the field’s thinking on this question. One framework, guided by ideas of information maximization, redundancy reduction, and efficient coding, focuses on the…

To resolve the fundamental question of how the mammalian neocortex learns to create complex hierarchical representations, two main competing theories that intersect ideas from neuroscience and machine learning are currently debated. The first theory draws inspiration from artificial neural networks, suggesting the…

The dynamic interplay of inhibitory and excitatory neurons drives the cortical functional repertoire. In the mammalian neocortex, inhibitory neurons are diverse. They are characterized by a variety of cellular attributes that enable their specialized roles in regulating information processing. It is increasingly clear…

Social interactions in nonhuman primates involve complex communication, outcome evaluation, and behavioral adjustments. Social gaze is a vital mechanism for gathering information during such interactions. We investigated the role of social gaze in cooperative behavior among common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) using…

Brain networks communicate through anatomical connections which are thought to mediate flexible, state-dependent interactions. We call the resulting pattern of communication “effective” or “functional” connectivity. In the motor system, within-day learning may rely primarily on modulation of networks, although the…

A change in pairwise spike train correlations is a well-established neural correlate of a shift in brain state, and as such has been the topic of intense study. However, while the explosion in population recording has provided a wealth of data to measure spike train correlations and their state dependence, there…

Imagine predicting the precise responses to arbitrary sensory stimuli for a neuron probed deeply within a brain. We developed a robust characterization technique called spike-triggered descent (STD) which optimally recovers n-order kernels for the very general cumulative spike response model (CSRM). This works by…

Mental imagery refers to our remarkable capacity to generate percepts, emotions, and thoughts in the absence of external stimuli. This ability allows us to generate art, simulate actions and outcomes, remember previous experiences, and imagine new ones. Little is known about the mechanisms that enable mental imagery.…

When we feel confident in a perceptual decision, that decision is more likely to be correct. How does the brain assess the quality of perceptual decisions? Here, we test two connected hypotheses. First, that perceptual confidence relates to the structure of population activity in the sensory cortex. And second, that…

Visual gamma entrainment using sensory stimuli (vGENUS) is a promising non-invasive therapeutic approach for Alzheimer's disease (AD), showing efficacy in improving memory function and physiological biomarkers levels in mice and, in perspective, also human patients. However, its mechanisms of action remain poorly…

When we are able to prepare in advance of a movement, the subsequent movements generally get better. Motor cortical activity during preparation has been studied extensively, showing clear relationships between the neural population state achieved during preparation and the parameters of the subsequent self-initiated…

Primates visually identify objects primarily by shape and also by texture. Models of primate vision based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve high object recognition performance but, unlike primates, emphasize texture over shape. Overcoming this texture bias and making models more brain-like requires data…

The basal ganglia are a network of subcortical nuclei that play a central role in regulating motor and cognitive functions. A critical hub in these structures is the external globus pallidus (GPe) as it links all nuclei in this network. This nucleus was long considered a homogenous relay in the motor-suppressing…