Topic: behavior

This Stanford symposium examines how molecular, cellular, and circuit-level advances in neurodevelopment shape understanding of behavior and health, with scientific talks, awards, and a poster session.

Nedah Nemati examines how neuroscience defines behavior and why freely moving animals and naturalistic experiments matter. She discusses how tools, historical assumptions and researchers' own experience influence scientific questions, including what studies of sleep reveal about the relationship between observation and explanation.

In the brain, the collective activity of neurons form trajectories on low dimensional neural manifolds. The neural computation underlying flexible cognition and behavior relies on dynamic control of these structures. For example, different tasks or behaviors are represented on different subspaces, requiring fast timescale subspace rotation to move from one behavior to the next. For flexibility in a particular behavior, the neural trajectory must be dynamically controllable within that behaviorally determined subspace. Here we propose mechanisms for fast timescale control of the neural subspace

Understanding the circuit mechanisms of brain computation and behavior is one of the central questions in neuroscience. Recent advances in task-optimized recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have opened a new avenue to directly link neural dynamics to behavior and uncover the underlying mechanisms by reverse engineering the trained RNNs. Previous studies leveraged fixed points to compare RNNs across limited tasks and found that while the geometry of neural representations varies, fixed point topology is consistent across RNNs despite differences in model architecture [1]. However, linearizing dyna