Optogenetics ePosters

The ability to switch between different behaviors is essential to all animals’ survival. Behavior selection is influenced by sensory inputs, internal states, and memory, suggesting that neural mechanisms across the brain coordinate these decisions. While investigating the neural basis of behavioral switching requires…

Working memory, the process through which information is transiently maintained and manipulated over a brief period, is essential for most cognitive functions. However, the mechanisms underlying the generation and evolution of working- memory neuronal representations at the population level over long timescales remain…

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…

A fundamental property of natural intelligence is the capacity to recognise and leverage statistical patterns in the environment to promote adaptive behaviour. This capability, often termed statistical learning (SL), enables us to construct accurate models of the world that aid in perception and decision-making, when…

Our ability to see and interact with the world heavily relies on the efficient and precise processing of visual information, consisting of multiple features continuously in flux. Visual perception arises from signals propagating through parallel neuronal pathways wiring the retina to both cortical (primary visual…

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…

Visual attention enhances the neural representation of salient stimuli within the visual cortex. Although it is generally thought that this enhancement is driven by glutamatergic feedback from frontal cortical areas, cortically released neuromodulators are also believed to play a major uncharacterized role. Here we…

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…

The meaning of individual events or cues in the environment is often dependent on their position relative to other cues surrounding them. The ability to learn about relationships between such ambiguous cues – often called structural learning – enables us to recognise common underlying structures of events and is…

Efficient spatial navigation in complex environments relies on the construction of an egocentric cognitive map. Recent studies have reported that subpopulations of excitatory neurons in the granular retrosplenial cortex (RSC) are selectively activated at specific distances and orientations relative to environmental…

Rapid learning confers significant advantages to animals in ecological environments. Despite the need for speed, animals appear to only slowly learn to associate rewarded actions with predictive cues. This slow learning is thought to be supported by a gradual expansion of predictive cue representation in the sensory…

How does the brain derive meaning from social vocalizations and drive behavior in response? Vocalizations are temporally complex, requiring integration across multiple time-scales for appropriate contextualization. We hypothesize that corticofugal projections modulate temporal integration in feed-forward auditory…

Prompt execution of planned motor action is context-dependent and a critical component of animal behavior. Studies from humans, non-human primates, and rodents have ubiquitously established that the primary motor cortex (M1) is the main hub for skilled motor learning, which relies on the precise coordination of…

Observation of neural firing patterns can constrain theories for the types of activity patterns that the brain uses to guide behavior. However, directly perturbing neural activity, ideally with great specificity, is required to causally test any particular theory. We combined two-photon (2p) imaging and cellular…

Phasic dopamine (DA) release plays a major role in learning by assigning incentive value to associated stimuli. A leading theory proposes that this process is analogous to a reinforcement learning algorithm called temporal difference (TD) learning, and that DA acts analogously to the reward prediction error (RPE) term…

How does the activity of midbrain dopamine (DA) neurons influence behavior? A prominent, but incompletely tested, hypothesis is that the activity of ventral tegmental area (VTA) DA neurons generates downstream representations of state values in ventral striatum (NAc), while substantia nigra pars compacta DA activity…

Brain-scale neural circuits transform visual input into discrete movements with appropriate speed, vigor, and duration. Yet, single-cell resolution and mechanistic characterization of such circuits in vertebrates have been elusive, largely due to the vast number of neurons and complexity of the mammalian brain. The…

The mammalian auditory system is remarkably adaptable, allowing animals to flexibly respond to sensory information in dynamic environments. Flexible behaviors, such as perceptual learning, involve the engagement of various neural circuits including top-down regions such as frontal areas. However, how multiple brain…

During naturalistic foraging, animals deploy complex decision-making strategies to acquire resources in the presence of uncertain environments. Here we focus on a probabilistic foraging task and how serotonergic (5-HT) neuromodulation affects mouse performance via optogenetic activation of the Dorsal Raphae nucleus…

Persistent neural activity underlies key cognitive functions like short-term memory. To support persistent neural activity, circuits must learn to balance recurrent amplification (prolonging network time constants) with sufficient robustness to gate out perturbations in local parts of the network. It remains unclear…

Animals employ different behavioral strategies to achieve the goal of sensory navigation. However, the factors that drive switches between different strategies---and the neural mechanisms underlying them---remain largely unknown. The nematode worm C. elegans is known to exhibit distinct “steering” and “turning”…

When making decisions, animals can employ many strategies, from relying on environmental stimuli to relying on internal biases. The roles of cortical regions in shaping these decision-making strategies remain unclear, often because we lack direct access to these internal variables. Here, we investigated how…

Recurrent dynamics are thought to be central to computation in the cerebral cortex. Yet, how these dynamics differ across areas remains unknown. Here, we used two-photon microscopy to image Ca2+ activity from hundreds of neurons and while delivering brief, focal excitatory input with near-cellular- resolution…

A long-standing theory proposes memories are stored in the synaptic wiring of strongly connected neural populations, known as neural assemblies. However, experimental evidence for assembly formation has been limited to inferring changes in synaptic connectivity from changes in neural activity following behavioral…