Changing Perspectives on Self Control
Yuko Munakata presents evidence challenging capacity-only accounts of self-control and explains how experience, effort, and expected payoff shape executive-function engagement and later outcomes.
Developmental and evolutionary perspectives on thalamic function
Brain organization and function is a complex topic. We are good at establishing correlates of perception and behavior across forebrain circuits, as well as manipulating activity in these circuits to affect behavior. However, we still lack good models for the large-scale organization and function of the forebrain. What are the contributions of the cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus to behavior? In addressing these questions, we often ascribe function to each area as if it were an independent processing unit. However, we know from the anatomy that the cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus, are massively interconnected in a large network. One way to generate insight into these questions is to consider the evolution and development of forebrain systems. In this talk, I will discuss the developmental and evolutionary (comparative anatomy) data on the thalamus, and how it fits within forebrain networks. I will address questions including, when did the thalamus appear in evolution, how is the thalamus organized across the vertebrate lineage, and how can the change in the organization of forebrain networks affect behavioral repertoires.
Clonal analysis at single cell level helps to understand neural crest development
Recent research on the neural crest has revealed the multipotency and plasticity of nerve-associated Schwann cell precursors, which can differentiate into diverse cell types, including parasympathetic neurons, neuroendocrine cells, and mesenchymal stem cells. These findings challenge the traditional view of peripheral nerves, highlighting their role as niches for migratory progenitor cells that contribute to tissue formation and regeneration.
Prosocial Learning and Motivation across the Lifespan
2024 BACN Early-Career Prize Lecture Many of our decisions affect other people. Our choices can decelerate climate change, stop the spread of infectious diseases, and directly help or harm others. Prosocial behaviours – decisions that help others – could contribute to reducing the impact of these challenges, yet their computational and neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. I will present recent work that examines prosocial motivation, how willing we are to incur costs to help others, prosocial learning, how we learn from the outcomes of our choices when they affect other people, and prosocial preferences, our self-reports of helping others. Throughout the talk, I will outline the possible computational and neural bases of these behaviours, and how they may differ from young adulthood to old age.
Dyslexia, Rhythm, Language and the Developing Brain
Recent insights from auditory neuroscience provide a new perspective on how the brain encodes speech. Using these recent insights, I will provide an overview of key factors underpinning individual differences in children’s development of language and phonology, providing a context for exploring atypical reading development (dyslexia). Children with dyslexia are relatively insensitive to acoustic cues related to speech rhythm patterns. This lack of rhythmic sensitivity is related to the atypical neural encoding of rhythm patterns in speech by the brain. I will describe our recent data from infants as well as children, demonstrating developmental continuity in the key neural variables.
Metabolic Remodelling in the Developing Forebrain in Health and Disease
Little is known about the critical metabolic changes that neural cells have to undergo during development and how temporary shifts in this program can influence brain circuitries and behavior. Motivated by the identification of autism-associated mutations in SLC7A5, a transporter for metabolically essential large neutral amino acids (LNAAs), we utilized metabolomic profiling to investigate the metabolic states of the cerebral cortex across various developmental stages. Our findings reveal significant metabolic restructuring occurring in the forebrain throughout development, with specific groups of metabolites exhibiting stage-specific changes. Through the manipulation of Slc7a5 expression in neural cells, we discovered an interconnected relationship between the metabolism of LNAAs and lipids within the cortex. Neuronal deletion of Slc7a5 influences the postnatal metabolic state, resulting in a shift in lipid metabolism and a cell-type-specific modification in neuronal activity patterns. This ultimately gives rise to enduring circuit dysfunction.
Cellular crosstalk in Neurodevelopmental Disorders
Cellular crosstalk is an essential process during brain development and it is influenced by numerous factors, including the morphology of the cells, their adhesion molecules, the local extracellular matrix and the secreted vesicles. Inspired by mutations associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, we focus on understanding the role of extracellular mechanisms essential for the correct development of the human brain. Hence, we combine the in vivo mouse model and the in vitro human-derived neurons, cerebral organoids, and dorso-ventral assembloids in order to better comprehend the molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in ventral progenitors’ proliferation and fate as well as migration and maturation of inhibitory neurons during human brain development and tackle the causes of neurodevelopmental disorders. We particularly focus on mutations in genes influencing cell-cell contacts, extracellular matrix, and secretion of vesicles and therefore study intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms contributing to the formation of the brain. Our data reveal an important contribution of cell non-autonomous mechanisms in the development of neurodevelopmental disorders.
Light-driven dopamine release in the adult and developing retina
The development of visual experience
Vision and visual cognition is experience-dependent with likely multiple sensitive periods, but we know very little about statistics of visual experience at the scale of everyday life and how they might change with development. By traditional assumptions, the world at the massive scale of daily life presents pretty much the same visual statistics to all perceivers. I will present an overview our work on ego-centric vision showing that this is not the case. The momentary image received at the eye is spatially selective, dependent on the location, posture and behavior of the perceiver. If a perceiver’s location, possible postures and/or preferences for looking at some kinds of scenes over others are constrained, then their sampling of images from the world and thus the visual statistics at the scale of daily life could be biased. I will present evidence with respect to both low-level and higher level visual statistics about the developmental changes in the visual input over the first 18 months post-birth.
Regulation of Cerebral Cortex Morphogenesis by Migrating Cells
How the brain uses experience to construct its multisensory capabilities
This talk will not be recorded
Cognitive supports for analogical reasoning in rational number understanding
In cognitive development, learning more than the input provides is a central challenge. This challenge is especially evident in learning the meaning of numbers. Integers – and the quantities they denote – are potentially infinite, as are the fractional values between every integer. Yet children’s experiences of numbers are necessarily finite. Analogy is a powerful learning mechanism for children to learn novel, abstract concepts from only limited input. However, retrieving proper analogy requires cognitive supports. In this talk, I seek to propose and examine number lines as a mathematical schema of the number system to facilitate both the development of rational number understanding and analogical reasoning. To examine these hypotheses, I will present a series of educational intervention studies with third-to-fifth graders. Results showed that a short, unsupervised intervention of spatial alignment between integers and fractions on number lines produced broad and durable gains in fractional magnitudes. Additionally, training on conceptual knowledge of fractions – that fractions denote magnitude and can be placed on number lines – facilitates explicit analogical reasoning. Together, these studies indicate that analogies can play an important role in rational number learning with the help of number lines as schemas. These studies shed light on helpful practices in STEM education curricula and instructions.
Interplay between circuits that mediate spontaneous retinal waves and early light responses during retinal development
Multisensory perception with newly learned sensory skills
Do large language models solve verbal analogies like children do?
Analogical reasoning –learning about new things by relating it to previous knowledge– lies at the heart of human intelligence and creativity and forms the core of educational practice. Children start creating and using analogies early on, making incredible progress moving from associative processes to successful analogical reasoning. For example, if we ask a four-year-old “Horse belongs to stable like chicken belongs to …?” they may use association and reply “egg”, whereas older children will likely give the intended relational response “chicken coop” (or other term to refer to a chicken’s home). Interestingly, despite state-of-the-art AI-language models having superhuman encyclopedic knowledge and superior memory and computational power, our pilot studies show that these large language models often make mistakes providing associative rather than relational responses to verbal analogies. For example, when we asked four- to eight-year-olds to solve the analogy “body is to feet as tree is to …?” they responded “roots” without hesitation, but large language models tend to provide more associative responses such as “leaves”. In this study we examine the similarities and differences between children's and six large language models' (Dutch/multilingual models: RobBERT, BERT-je, M-BERT, GPT-2, M-GPT, Word2Vec and Fasttext) responses to verbal analogies extracted from an online adaptive learning environment, where >14,000 7-12 year-olds from the Netherlands solved 20 or more items from a database of 900 Dutch language verbal analogies.
Sleep, development and chromatin regulation in autism
Butterfly effects in perceptual development
How neural circuits organize and learn during development
To generate brain circuits that are both flexible and stable requires the coordination of powerful developmental mechanisms acting at different scales, including activity-dependent synaptic plasticity and changes in single neuron properties. The brain prepares to efficiently compute information and reliably generate behavior during early development without any prior sensory experience but through patterned spontaneous activity. After the onset of sensory experience, ongoing activity continues to modify sensory circuits, and plays an important functional role in the mature brain. Using quantitative data analysis, experiment-driven theory and computational modeling, I will present a framework for how neural circuits are built and organized during early postnatal development into functional units, and how they are modified by intact and perturbed sensory-evoked activity. Inspired by experimental data from sensory cortex, I will then show how neural circuits use the resulting non-random connectivity to flexibly gate a network’s response, providing a mechanism for routing information.
Learning from others, helping others learn: Cognitive foundations of distinctively human social learning
Learning does not occur in isolation. From parent-child interactions to formal classroom environments, humans explore, learn, and communicate in rich, diverse social contexts. Rather than simply observing and copying their conspecifics, humans engage in a range of epistemic practices that actively recruit those around them. What makes human social learning so distinctive, powerful, and smart? In this talk, I will present a series of studies that reveal the remarkably sophisticated inferential abilities that young children show not only in how they learn from others but also in how they help others learn. Children interact with others as learners and as teachers to learn and communicate about the world, about others, and even about the self. The results collectively paint a picture of human social learning that is far more than copying and imitation: It is active, bidirectional, and cooperative. I will end by discussing ongoing work that extends this picture beyond what we typically call “social learning”, with implications for building better machines that learn from and interact with humans.
Children’s inference of verb meanings: Inductive, analogical and abductive inference
Children need inference in order to learn the meanings of words. They must infer the referent from the situation in which a target word is said. Furthermore, to be able to use the word in other situations, they also need to infer what other referents the word can be generalized to. As verbs refer to relations between arguments, verb learning requires relational analogical inference, something which is challenging to young children. To overcome this difficulty, young children recruit a diverse range of cues in their inference of verb meanings, including, but not limited to, syntactic cues and social and pragmatic cues as well as statistical cues. They also utilize perceptual similarity (object similarity) in progressive alignment to extract relational verb meanings and further to gain insights about relational verb meanings. However, just having a list of these cues is not useful: the cues must be selected, combined, and coordinated to produce the optimal interpretation in a particular context. This process involves abductive reasoning, similar to what scientists do to form hypotheses from a range of facts or evidence. In this talk, I discuss how children use a chain of inferences to learn meanings of verbs. I consider not only the process of analogical mapping and progressive alignment, but also how children use abductive inference to find the source of analogy and gain insights into the general principles underlying verb learning. I also present recent findings from my laboratory that show that prelinguistic human infants use a rudimentary form of abductive reasoning, which enables the first step of word learning.
The evolution and development of visual complexity: insights from stomatopod visual anatomy, physiology, behavior, and molecules
Bioluminescence, which is rare on land, is extremely common in the deep sea, being found in 80% of the animals living between 200 and 1000 m. These animals rely on bioluminescence for communication, feeding, and/or defense, so the generation and detection of light is essential to their survival. Our present knowledge of this phenomenon has been limited due to the difficulty in bringing up live deep-sea animals to the surface, and the lack of proper techniques needed to study this complex system. However, new genomic techniques are now available, and a team with extensive experience in deep-sea biology, vision, and genomics has been assembled to lead this project. This project is aimed to study three questions 1) What are the evolutionary patterns of different types of bioluminescence in deep-sea shrimp? 2) How are deep-sea organisms’ eyes adapted to detect bioluminescence? 3) Can bioluminescent organs (called photophores) detect light in addition to emitting light? Findings from this study will provide valuable insight into a complex system vital to communication, defense, camouflage, and species recognition. This study will bring monumental contributions to the fields of deep sea and evolutionary biology, and immediately improve our understanding of bioluminescence and light detection in the marine environment. In addition to scientific advancement, this project will reach K-college aged students through the development and dissemination of educational tools, a series of molecular and organismal-based workshops, museum exhibits, public seminars, and biodiversity initiatives.
Four questions about brain and behaviour
Tinbergen encouraged ethologists to address animal behaviour by answering four questions, covering physiology, adaptation, phylogeny, and development. This broad approach has implications for neuroscience and psychology, yet, questions about phylogeny are rarely considered in these fields. Here I describe how phylogeny can shed light on our understanding of brain structure and function. Further, I show that we now have or are developing the data and analytical methods necessary to study the natural history of the human mind.
Epileptogenesis in the developing brain:understanding a moving target
The origins, mechanisms and consequences of epilepsy in the developing brain are incompletely understood. Many developmental epilepsies have a genetic basis and their mechanisms stem from deficits in the function of one or numerous genes. Others, such as those that follow prolonged febrile seizures or severe birth asphyxia in a ‘normal’ brain may depend on the interaction of the insult with the rapidly evolving brain cells and circuits. Yet, how early-life insults may provoke epilepsy is unclear, and requires multiple levels of analysis: behavior, circuits, cells [neurons, glia] and molecules. Here we discuss developmental epileptogenesis, addressing some of its special features: the epilepsy phenotype, the effects insults on the maturation of brain circuits, the role of neuron-glia-neuron communication in cellular and circuit refinement, and how transient epileptogenic insults provoke enduring changes in the structure, connectivity and function of salient neuronal populations. We will highlight resolved questions- and the many unresolved issues that require tackling in 2022 and beyond.
Mapping the Dynamics of the Linear and 3D Genome of Single Cells in the Developing Brain
Three intimately related dimensions of the mammalian genome—linear DNA sequence, gene transcription, and 3D genome architecture—are crucial for the development of nervous systems. Changes in the linear genome (e.g., de novo mutations), transcriptome, and 3D genome structure lead to debilitating neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia. However, current technologies and data are severely limited: (1) 3D genome structures of single brain cells have not been solved; (2) little is known about the dynamics of single-cell transcriptome and 3D genome after birth; (3) true de novo mutations are extremely difficult to distinguish from false positives (DNA damage and/or amplification errors). Here, I filled in this longstanding technological and knowledge gap. I recently developed a high-resolution method—diploid chromatin conformation capture (Dip-C)—which resolved the first 3D structure of the human genome, tackling a longstanding problem dating back to the 1880s. Using Dip-C, I obtained the first 3D genome structure of a single brain cell, and created the first transcriptome and 3D genome atlas of the mouse brain during postnatal development. I found that in adults, 3D genome “structure types” delineate all major cell types, with high correlation between chromatin A/B compartments and gene expression. During development, both transcriptome and 3D genome are extensively transformed in the first month of life. In neurons, 3D genome is rewired across scales, correlated with gene expression modules, and independent of sensory experience. Finally, I examined allele-specific structure of imprinted genes, revealing local and chromosome-wide differences. More recently, I expanded my 3D genome atlas to the human and mouse cerebellum—the most consistently affected brain region in autism. I uncovered unique 3D genome rewiring throughout life, providing a structural basis for the cerebellum’s unique mode of development and aging. In addition, to accurately measure de novo mutations in a single cell, I developed a new method—multiplex end-tagging amplification of complementary strands (META-CS), which eliminates nearly all false positives by virtue of DNA complementarity. Using META-CS, I determined the true mutation spectrum of single human brain cells, free from chemical artifacts. Together, my findings uncovered an unknown dimension of neurodevelopment, and open up opportunities for new treatments for autism and other developmental disorders.
Symposium on cross-cultural research in analogical reasoning
Abstracts: https://www.sites.google.com/site/analogylist/cross-cultural-symposium
Do Capuchin Monkeys, Chimpanzees and Children form Overhypotheses from Minimal Input? A Hierarchical Bayesian Modelling Approach
Abstract concepts are a powerful tool to store information efficiently and to make wide-ranging predictions in new situations based on sparse data. Whereas looking-time studies point towards an early emergence of this ability in human infancy, other paradigms like the relational match to sample task often show a failure to detect abstract concepts like same and different until the late preschool years. Similarly, non-human animals have difficulties solving those tasks and often succeed only after long training regimes. Given the huge influence of small task modifications, there is an ongoing debate about the conclusiveness of these findings for the development and phylogenetic distribution of abstract reasoning abilities. Here, we applied the concept of “overhypotheses” which is well known in the infant and cognitive modeling literature to study the capabilities of 3 to 5-year-old children, chimpanzees, and capuchin monkeys in a unified and more ecologically valid task design. In a series of studies, participants themselves sampled reward items from multiple containers or witnessed the sampling process. Only when they detected the abstract pattern governing the reward distributions within and across containers, they could optimally guide their behavior and maximize the reward outcome in a novel test situation. We compared each species’ performance to the predictions of a probabilistic hierarchical Bayesian model capable of forming overhypotheses at a first and second level of abstraction and adapted to their species-specific reward preferences.
Stress deceleration theory: chronic adolescent stress exposure results in decelerated neurobehavioral maturation
Normative development in adolescence indicates that the prefrontal cortex is still under development thereby unable to exert efficient top-down inhibitory control on subcortical regions such as the basolateral amygdala and the nucleus accumbens. This imbalance in the developmental trajectory between cortical and subcortical regions is implicated in expression of the prototypical impulsive, compulsive, reward seeking and risk-taking adolescent behavior. Here we demonstrate that a chronic mild unpredictable stress procedure during adolescence in male Wistar rats arrests the normal behavioral maturation such that they continue to express adolescent-like impulsive, hyperactive, and compulsive behaviors into late adulthood. This arrest in behavioral maturation is associated with the hypoexcitability of prelimbic cortex (PLC) pyramidal neurons and reduced PLC-mediated synaptic glutamatergic control of BLA and nucleus accumbens core (NAcC) neurons that lasts late into adulthood. At the same time stress exposure in adolescence results in the hyperexcitability of the BLA pyramidal neurons sending stronger glutamatergic projections to the NAcC. Chemogenetic reversal of the PLC hypoexcitability decreased compulsivity and improved the expression of goal-directed behavior in rats exposed to stress during adolescence, suggesting a causal role for PLC hypoexcitability in this stress-induced arrested behavioral development. (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.21.469381v1.abstract)
Common elements: An innovative methodology for identifying effective interventions in early childhood education
Evidence-based education programmes, like many clinical interventions, are multi-faceted and can be expensive to implement. In this talk I will describe an alternative: distilling the common elements across many evidence-based programmes. Published programme manuals are selected through systematic review, then extensively coded and cross-referenced. Finally, the common elements that emerge are shared with practitioners as part of a ‘library’ of practices (rather than a holistic programme manual). Although the common elements methodology has been used in the prevention and intervention sciences, this project reflects the first attempt at applying this approach to early childhood education. I will describe the common elements methods and preliminary findings from our Nuffield-funded project, in collaboration with the Early Intervention Foundation. I will discuss the challenges and opportunities we have encountered, alongside our strategies for sharing evidence with practitioners in a digestible way.
What happens to our ability to perceive multisensory information as we age?
Our ability to perceive the world around us can be affected by a number of factors including the nature of the external information, prior experience of the environment, and the integrity of the underlying perceptual system. A particular challenge for the brain is to maintain a coherent perception from information encoded by the peripheral sensory organs whose function is affected by typical, developmental changes across the lifespan. Yet, how the brain adapts to the maturation of the senses, as well as experiential changes in the multisensory environment, is poorly understood. Over the past few years, we have used a range of multisensory tasks to investigate the role of ageing on the brain’s ability to merge sensory inputs. In particular, we have embedded an audio-visual task based on the sound-induced flash illusion (SIFI) into a large-scale, longitudinal study of ageing. Our findings support the idea that the temporal binding window (TBW) is modulated by age and reveal important individual differences in this TBW that may have clinical implications. However, our investigations also suggest the TWB is experience-dependent with evidence for both long and short term behavioural plasticity. An overview of these findings, including recent evidence on how multisensory integration may be associated with higher order functions, will be discussed.
Epigenetic regulation of neural progenitor cells in the developing neocortex
NMC4 Short Talk: Maggot brain, mirror image? A statistical analysis of bilateral symmetry in an insect brain connectome
Neuroscientists have many questions about connectomes that revolve around the ability to compare networks. For example, comparing connectomes could help explain how neural wiring is related to individual differences, genetics, disease, development, or learning. One such question is that of bilateral symmetry: are the left and right sides of a connectome the same? Here, we investigate the bilateral symmetry of a recently presented connectome of an insect brain, the Drosophila larva. We approach this question from the perspective of two-sample testing for networks. First, we show how this question of “sameness” can be framed as a variety of different statistical hypotheses, each with different assumptions. Then, we describe test procedures for each of these hypotheses. We show how these different test procedures perform on both the observed connectome as well as a suite of synthetic perturbations to the connectome. We also point out that these tests require careful attention to parameter alignment and differences in network density in order to provide biologically meaningful results. Taken together, these results provide the first statistical characterization of bilateral symmetry for an entire brain at the single-neuron level, while also giving practical recommendations for future comparisons of connectome networks.
NeurotechRI Kickoff Meeting
The digital kickoff of NeurotechRI will take place on the 26th from 13:00 to 16:00 (CET). Come and join us as we discuss our plans for the Graduate School and our research and innovation roadmap! The programme can be downloaded here. Don’t miss out on our Board of Governors presentation of the project and the synergies with NeurotechEU, meet with our keynote speakers from the European Research Executive Agency: Mr Stijn Delaure (DG R&I, Unit A3 “R&I Actors and Research Careers”) and Ms Marta Truco Calbet (DG R&I, Unit C.4 "Reforming European R&I and Research Infrastructures''). Last but not least, the day will finish with a roundtable discussion organised by our students society. The roundtable will be an open space and an opportunity for all students to discuss their needs in education. Registration is open: www.crowdcast.io/e/neurotechri-kickoff
NeurotechEU Summit
Our first NeurotechEU Summit will be fully digital and will take place on November 22th from 09:00 to 17:00 (CET). The final programme can be downloaded here. Hosted by the Karolinska Institutet, the summit will provide you an overview of our actions and achievements from the last year and introduce the priorities for the next year. You will also have the opportunity to attend the finals of the 3 minute thesis competition (3MT) organized by the Synapses Student Society, the student charter of NeurotechEU. Good luck to all the finalists: Lynn Le, Robin Noordhof, Adriana Gea González, Juan Carranza Valencia, Lea van Husen, Guoming (Tony) Man, Lilly Pitshaporn Leelaarporn, Cemre Su, Kaya Keleş, Ramazan Tarık Türksoy, Cristiana Tisca, Sara Bandiera, Irina Maria Vlad, Iulia Vadan, Borbála László, and David Papp! Don’t miss our keynote lecture, success stories and interactive discussions with Ms Vanessa Debiais Sainton (Head of Higher Education Unit, European Commission), Prof. Staffan Holmin (Karolinska Institutet), Dr Mohsen Kaboli (BMW Group, member of the NeurotechEU Associates Advisory Committee), and Prof. Peter Hagoort (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Donders Institute). Would you like to use this opportunity to network? Please join our informal breakout sessions on Wonder.me at 11:40 CET. You will be able to move from one discussion group to another within 3 sessions: NeurotechEU ecosystem - The Associates Advisory Committee: Synergies in cross-sectoral initiatives Education next: Trans-European education and the European Universities Initiatives - Lessons learned thus far. Equality, diversity and inclusion at NeurotechEU: removing access barriers to education and developing a working, learning, and social environment where everyone is respected and valued. You can register for this free event at www.crowdcast.io/e/neurotecheu-summit
Abstraction doesn't happen all at once (despite what some models of concept learning suggest)
In the past few years, there has been growing evidence that the basic ability for relational generalization starts in early infancy, with 3-month-olds seeming to learn relational abstractions with little training. Further, work with toddlers seem to suggest that relational generalizations are no more difficult than those based on objects, and they can readily consider both simultaneously. Likewise, causal learning research with adults suggests that people infer causal relationships at multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously as they learn about novel causal systems. These findings all appear counter to theories of concept learning that posit when concepts are first learned they tend to be concrete (tied to specific contexts and features) and abstraction proceeds incrementally as learners encounter more examples. The current talk will not question the veracity of any of these findings but will present several others from my and others’ research on relational learning that suggests that when the perceptual or conceptual content becomes more complex, patterns of incremental abstraction re-emerge. Further, the specific contexts and task parameters that support or hinder abstraction reveal the underlying cognitive processes. I will then consider whether the models that posit simultaneous, immediate learning at multiple levels of abstraction can accommodate these more complex patterns.
3 Minutes Thesis Competition: Pre-selection event
On behalf of NeurotechEU, we are pleased to invite you to participate in the Summit 2021 pre-selection event on October 23, 2021. The event will be held online via the Platform Crowdcast.io, and it is going to be organized by NeurotechEU-The European University of Brain and Technology. Students from all over NeurotechEU have the chance to present their research (bachelor’s thesis, Master’s thesis, PhD, post-doc…) following the methodology of three minutes thesis (3MT from the University of Queensland): https://threeminutethesis.uq.edu.au/resources/3mt-competitor-guide. There will be one session per university and at the end of it, two semi-finalists will be selected from each university. They will compete in the Summit 2021 on November 22nd. There will be prizes for the winners who will be selected by voting of the audience.
What is the function of auditory cortex when it develops in the absence of acoustic input?
Cortical plasticity is the neural mechanism by which the cerebrum adapts itself to its environment, while at the same time making it vulnerable to impoverished sensory or developmental experiences. Like the visual system, auditory development passes through a series of sensitive periods in which circuits and connections are established and then refined by experience. Current research is expanding our understanding of cerebral processing and organization in the deaf. In the congenitally deaf, higher-order areas of "deaf" auditory cortex demonstrate significant crossmodal plasticity with neurons responding to visual and somatosensory stimuli. This crucial cerebral function results in compensatory plasticity. Not only can the remaining inputs reorganize to substitute for those lost, but this additional circuitry also confers enhanced abilities to the remaining systems. In this presentation we will review our present understanding of the structure and function of “deaf” auditory cortex using psychophysical, electrophysiological, and connectional anatomy approaches and consider how this knowledge informs our expectations of the capabilities of cochlear implants in the developing brain.
Chapter 1. Reconstructing history
Multisensory Integration: Development, Plasticity, and Translational Applications
Mechanistic insights from a mouse model of HCN1 developmental epileptic encephalopathy
Pathogenic variants in HCN1 are associated with severe developmental and epileptic encephalopathies (DEE). We have engineered the Hcn1 M294L heterozygous knock-in (Hcn1M294L) mouse which is a homolog of the de novo HCN1 M305L recurrent pathogenic variant. The mouse recapitulates the phenotypic features of patients including having spontaneous seizures and a learning deficit. In this talk I will present experimental work that probes the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying hyper-excitability in the mouse model. This will include testing the efficacy of currently available antiepileptic drugs and a novel precision medicine approach. I will also briefly touch on how disease biology can give insights into the biophysical properties of HCN channels.
Achieving Abstraction: Early Competence & the Role of the Learning Context
Children's emerging ability to acquire and apply relational same-different concepts is often cited as a defining feature of human cognition, providing the foundation for abstract thought. Yet, young learners often struggle to ignore irrelevant surface features to attend to structural similarity instead. I will argue that young children have--and retain--genuine relational concepts from a young age, but tend to neglect abstract similarity due to a learned bias to attend to objects and their properties. Critically, this account predicts that differences in the structure of children's environmental input should lead to differences in the type of hypotheses they privilege and apply. I will review empirical support for this proposal that has (1) evaluated the robustness of early competence in relational reasoning, (2) identified cross-cultural differences in relational and object bias, and (3) provided evidence that contextual factors play a causal role in relational reasoning. Together, these studies suggest that the development of abstract thought may be more malleable and context-sensitive than initially believed.
Probabilistic Analogical Mapping with Semantic Relation Networks
Hongjing Lu will present a new computational model of Probabilistic Analogical Mapping (PAM, in collaboration with Nick Ichien and Keith Holyoak) that finds systematic correspondences between inputs generated by machine learning. The model adopts a Bayesian framework for probabilistic graph matching, operating on semantic relation networks constructed from distributed representations of individual concepts (word embeddings created by Word2vec) and of relations between concepts (created by our BART model). We have used PAM to simulate a broad range of phenomena involving analogical mapping by both adults and children. Our approach demonstrates that human-like analogical mapping can emerge from comparison mechanisms applied to rich semantic representations of individual concepts and relations. More details can be found https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2103/2103.16704.pdf
Neuro-Immune Coupling: How the Immune System Sculpts Brain Circuitry
In this lecture, Dr Stevens will discuss recent work that implicates brain immune cells, called microglia, in sculpting of synaptic connections during development and their relevance to autism, schizophrenia and other brain disorders. Her recent work revealed a key role for microglia and a group of immune related molecules called complement in normal developmental synaptic pruning, a normal process required to establish precise brain wiring. Emerging evidence suggests aberrant regulation of this pruning pathway may contribute to synaptic and cognitive dysfunction in a host of brain disorders, including schizophrenia. Recent research has revealed that a person’s risk of schizophrenia is increased if they inherit specific variants in complement C4, gene plays a well-known role in the immune system but also helps sculpt developing synapses in the mouse visual system (Sekar et al., 2016). Together these findings may help explain known features of schizophrenia, including reduced numbers of synapses in key cortical regions and an adolescent age of onset that corresponds with developmentally timed waves of synaptic pruning in these regions. Stevens will discuss this and ongoing work to understand the mechanisms by which complement and microglia prune specific synapses in the brain. A deeper understanding of how these immune mechanisms mediate synaptic pruning may provide novel insight into how to protect synapses in autism and other brain disorders, including Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s Disease.
Evolving Neural Networks
Evolution has shaped neural circuits in a very specific manner, slowly and aimlessly incorporating computational innovations that increased the chances to survive and reproduce of the newly born species. The discoveries done by the Evolutionary Developmental (Evo-Devo) biology field during the last decades have been crucial for our understanding of the gradual emergence of such innovations. In turn, Computational Neuroscience practitioners modeling the brain are becoming increasingly aware of the need to build models that incorporate these innovations to replicate the computational strategies used by the brain to solve a given task. The goal of this workshop is to bring together experts from Systems and Computational Neuroscience, Machine Learning and the Evo-Devo field to discuss if and how knowing the evolutionary history of neural circuits can help us understand the way the brain works, as well as the relative importance of learned VS innate neural mechanisms.
Science and technology to understand developmental multisensory processing
The history, future and ethics of self-experimentation
Modern day “neurohackers” are radically self-experimenting, attempting genomic modification with CRISPR-Cas9 constructs and electrode insertion into their cortex amongst a host of other things. Institutions wanting to avoid the risks bought on by these procedures, generally avoid involvement with self-experimenting research. Modern day “neurohackers” are radically self-experimenting, attempting genomic modification with CRISPR-Cas9 constructs and electrode insertion into their cortex amongst a host of other things. Institutions wanting to avoid the risks bought on by these procedures, generally avoid involvement with self-experimenting research. But what is the ethical thing to do? Should researchers be allowed or encouraged to self-experiment? Should institutions support or hinder them? Where do you think that this process of self-experimentation could take us? This presentation by Dr Matt Lennon and Professor Zoltan Molnar of the University of Oxford, will explore the history, future and ethics of self-experimentation. It will explore notable examples of self-experimenters including Isaac Newton, Angelo Ruffini and Oliver Sacks and how a number of these pivotal experiments created paradigm shifts in neuroscience. The presentation will open up a forum for all participants to be involved asking key ethical questions around what should and should not be allowed in self-experimentation research.
Experience-independent brain development in perception and action systems
Representations of abstract relations in infancy
Abstract relations are considered the pinnacle of human cognition, allowing analogical and logical reasoning, and possibly setting humans apart from other animal species. Such relations cannot be represented in a perceptual code but can easily be represented in a propositional language of thought, where relations between objects are represented by abstract discrete symbols. Focusing on the abstract relations same and different, I will show that (1) there is a discontinuity along ontogeny with respect to the representations of abstract relations, but (2) young infants already possess representations of same and different. Finally, (3) I will investigate the format of representation of abstract relations in young infants, arguing that those representations are not discrete, but rather built by juxtaposing abstract representations of entities.
Clinical, Cognitive and Neuroscience Insights into Multisensory Processes
Retinal organoids from pluripotent stem cells: from development to disease
Synapse and Circuit Development
The symposium will start with A/Prof Jenny Gunnersen who will present “New insights into mechanisms of excitatory synapse development”. Then, Dr Tommas Ellender will deal with the “Embryonic neural progenitor pools and the generation of fine-scale neural circuits” and Dr Thomas Marissal will talk about “Parvalbumin interneurons: the missing link between the micro and macroscopic alterations related to neurodevelopmental disorders?"”.
Students to Professors: Inspiring NeurotechEU Women
The NeurotechEU student councils invites you to a special event on the occasion of the International Women's Day. 15 different speakers from very different backgrounds, seniority and expertise will share their experience on women in science, from students, to professeurs, to researchers, to the European Commission, discover their very unique insights.
Cellular/circuit dysfunction across development in a model of Dravet syndrome
Dravet syndrome (DS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder caused by heterozygous loss-of-function of the gene SCN1A encoding the voltage-gated sodium channel subunit Nav1.1, and is defined by treatment-resistant epilepsy, intellectual impairment, and sudden death. However, disease mechanisms remain unclear, as previously-identified deficiency in action potential generation of Nav1.1-expressing parvalbumin-positive fast-spiking GABAergic interneurons (PV-INs) in DS (Scn1a+/-) mice normalizes during development. We used a novel approach that facilitated the assessment of PV-IN function at both early (post-natal day (P) 16-21) and late (P35-56) time points in the same mice. We confirmed that PV-IN spike generation was impaired at P16-21 in all mice (those deceased from SUDEP by P35 and those surviving to P35-56). However, unitary synaptic transmission assessed in PV-IN:principal cell paired recordings was severely dysfunctional selectively in mice recorded at P16-21 that did not survive to P35. Spike generation in surviving mice had normalized by P35-56; yet we again identified abnormalities in synaptic transmission in surviving mice. We propose that early dysfunction of PV-IN spike propagation drives epilepsy severity and risk of sudden death, while persistent dysfunction of spike propagation contributes to chronic DS pathology.
Assembly of the neocortex
The symposium will start with Prof Song-Hai Shi who will present “Assembly of the neocortex”. Then, Dr Lynette Lim will talk about “Shared and Unique Developmental Trajectories of Cortical Inhibitory Neurons”. Dr Alfredo Molina will deal with the “Tuneable progenitor cells to build the cerebral cortex”, and Prof Tomasz Nowakowski will present “Charting the molecular 'protomap' of the human cerebral cortex using single cell genomic”.
Fundamental Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms governing Brain Development
The symposium will start with Prof Cooper who will present “From neural tube to neocortex: the role of adhesion in maintaining stem cell morphology and function”. Then, Dr Tsai will talk about “In the search for new genes involved in brain development and disorders”. Dr Del Pino will deal with the “Regulation of intrinsic network activity during area patterning in the cerebral cortex”, and Dr Wang will present “Modelling Neurodevelopmental Disorders in Flies”.
Vulnerable periods of brain development in ion channelopathies
Brain and neuronal network development depend on a complex sequence of events, which include neurogenesis, migration, differentiation, synaptogenesis, and synaptic pruning. Perturbations to any of these processes, for example associated with ion channel gene mutations (i.e., channelopathies), can underlie neurodevelopmental disorders such as neonatal and infantile epilepsies, strongly impair psychomotor development and cause persistent deficits in cognition, motor skills, or motor control. The therapeutic options available are very limited, and prophylactic therapies for patients at an increased risk of developing such epilepsies do not exist yet. By using genetic mouse models in which we controlled the activities of Kv7/M or HCN/h-channels during different developmental periods, we obtained offspring with distinct neurological phenotypes that could not simply be reversed by the re-introduction of the affected ion channel in juvenile or adult animals. The results indicate that channelopathy/mutation-specific treatments of neonatal and infantile epilepsies and their comorbidities need to be targeted to specific sensitive periods.
Cellular-resolution gene expression profiling in the neonatal marmoset brain reveals dynamic species- and region-specific differences
Space for Thinking - Spatial Reference Frames and Abstract Concepts
People from cultures around the world tend to borrow from the domain of space to represent abstract concepts. For example, in the domain on time, we use spatial metaphors (e.g., describing the future as being in front and the past behind), accompany our speech with spatial gestures (e.g., gesturing to the left to refer to a past event), and use external tools that project time onto a spatial reference frame (e.g., calendars). Importantly, these associations are also present in the way we think and reason about time, suggesting that space and time are also linked in the mind. In this talk, I will explore the developmental origins and functional implications of these types of cross-dimensional associations. To start, I will discuss the roles that language and culture play in shaping how children in the US and India represent time. Next, I will use word learning and memory as test cases for exploring why cross-dimensional associations may be cognitively advantageous. Finally, I will talk about future directions and the practical implications for this line of work, with a focus on how encouraging spatial representations of abstract concepts could improve learning outcomes.
How to make a Hippocampus
The assembly of a functional neocortex
3rd Annual Conference on Quantitative Approaches in Biology
This conference is a free event that includes a range of activities to stimulate the cross-fertilization of ideas, including invited speaker talks, workshops, micro talks, an undergraduate research competition, a contest to discover mathematical questions in biology, and plenty of networking opportunities. Today's speakers: Cassandra Extavour, William Bialek, Amy Shyer, Ankur Saxena, Jie Liang