Physiology ePosters

Noradrenaline (NA) is a ubiquitous neuromodulator largely produced by locus coeruleus (LC) neurons that impacts multiple cognitive processes. Non-invasive methods are used to track LC-NA activity. For instance, pupillometry is shown to be linked to arousal state, LC-NA, and other neuromodulator activity. However,…

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…

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…

Sensory information is first processed by various thalamic nuclei before reaching the pallium in amniotes, where it is used for higher-order computations such as integrating diverse sensory information that can be utilized to form associations. In teleost fish, the dorsal thalamic nuclei, believed to be analogous to…

The relationship between morphology, connectivity, and function is a central challenge in neuroscience. The possibility of predicting neuronal function from morphology and connectivity has motivated the field to produce connectomes for increasingly complex organisms. With the recent completion of multiple connectomes…

Introduction: Spontaneous activity in visual cortex is high-dimensional and state-dependent, yet its organizing principles are unclear (Stringer et al. Science 2019; Berkes et al. Science 2011). We combine large-scale imaging, modelling, and theory to ask: 1. Does spontaneous activity share the structure of evoked…

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…

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…

Axial proprioceptive sensory feedback plays a crucial role in modulating locomotion, enabling vertebrates to dynamically adjust motor output in response to body movements and environmental forces. In this study, we present a spiking neuromechanical model of the zebrafish, focusing on how proprioceptive signals from…

Social pain, the emotional pain caused by aversive experiences with one’s social group, can have deleterious effects on both mental and physical health1–3. Multiple theories have proposed that the experience of social pain can modulate physical pain5,6, but a neural mechanism has never been discovered. To address this…

Serotonin (5-HT) is implicated in decision-making, such as signaling prediction errors and cue values, as well as to the regulation of behavioral states of wakefulness and arousal, but the relationship between these two domains of function is not well understood. On one hand, serotonin activity is negatively…

The sensory world is highly dynamic, and the temporal structure of stimuli contains rich information about the environment. Odour plumes are shaped by complex airflow that imprint information about the nature and spatial organisation of the olfactory environment onto their temporal dynamics. Whilst insects and mammals…

Recurrent connections are a fundamental feature of neural circuits, enabling feedback loops that regulate network activity. Connectome datasets show strong recurrent connections in the fruit fly visual system, where motion information is processed. However, current models of motion detection focus on feedforward…

To understand the cortical control of complex limb movements, we must identify how movement control signals differ across different sensorimotor regions. Here we characterize the structure of movement-related activity across 6 subregions of primary and secondary motor (M1 and M2) and primary somatosensory cortex (S1)…

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…

Brain-wide neuromodulation by behavioral variables, such as locomotion, pupil area, and face motion, have been observed in mice (Stringer et al., 2019; Musall et al., 2019). To study this mechanism at higher spatial resolution, we used two-photon imaging that allows recording of individual neuronal and synaptic bouton…

Brains can process sensory information from different modalities at astonishing speed; this is surprising as already the integration of inputs through the membrane causes a delayed response. Experiments reveal a possible explanation for the fast processing, showing that neurons can advance their output firing rate…

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…

The mammalian Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) has been suggested to modulate sensory information processing across multiple cortical regions via long-range axonal projections. These axonal projections arise from discrete PFC subregions with unique brain-wide connectivity and functional repertoires, which may provide the…

The sleeping brain is in a constant tradeoff between maintaining its quiescent state, thought to support homeostatic processes, and interrupting it to deal with external contingencies such as threat. While evidence suggests that sleep interruption is an associative contextual process, little is known about its…

The hippocampal formation is a crucial region in the encoding and retrieval of memory, thought to be mediated through ensemble formation and recruitment or intrinsic attractor dynamics. Additionally, it has been shown that overall hippocampal population activity reflects environmental novelty. However, a common neural…

When confronted with immediate threats, selecting the appropriate behavior at the right moment is essential for survival. Animals must constantly process information from the environment to accurately identify potential danger and respond by escaping to safety. While escape is largely instinctive, it is also…

Developing a technology able to measure in-vivo and non-invasively the electrical activity of the human spinal cord would fulfill an important and still unmet need in both basic and clinical research. In this work, we describe a novel recording and analysis pipeline to obtain non-invasive, high-resolution images of…