Topic: Coordination

Coordination between excitatory and inhibitory synapses (providing positive and negative signals respectively) is required to ensure proper information processing in the brain. Many brain disorders, especially neurodevelopental disorders, are rooted in a specific disturbance of this coordination. In my research group we use a combination of two-photon microscopy and electrophisiology to examine how inhibitory synapses are fromed and how this formation is coordinated with nearby excitatroy synapses.

Natural systems provide both puzzles to unravel and demonstrations of what's possible. The natural world is full of complex systems of dynamically interchangeable, individually unreliable components that produce effective and reliable outcomes at the group level. A complementary goal to understanding the operation of such systems is that of being able to engineer artifacts that work in a similar way. One notable type of collective behavior is collective construction, epitomized by mound-building termites, which build towering, intricate mounds through the joint activity of millions of independ

How can people coordinate their actions or make joint decisions? One possibility is that each person attempts to predict the actions of the other(s), and best-responds accordingly. But this can lead to bad outcomes, and sometimes even vicious circularity. An alternative view is that each person attempts to work out what the two or more players would agree to do, if they were to bargain explicitly. If the result of such a "virtual" bargain is "obvious," then the players can simply play their respective roles in that bargain. I suggest that virtual bargaining is essential to genuinely social int

In the past decade evidence has accumulated in favor of the hypothesis that multiple sub-networks in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) are characterized by low-dimensional, continuous attractor dynamics. Much has been learned about the joint activity of grid cells within a module (a module consists of grid cells that share a common grid spacing), but little is known about the interactions between them. Under typical conditions of spatial exploration in which sensory cues are abundant, all grid-cells in the MEC represent the animal’s position in space and their joint activity lies on a two-dim