Topic: Hidden Markov Model

Cognitive maps confer animals with flexible intelligence by representing spatial, temporal, and abstract relationships that can be used to shape thought, planning, and behavior. Cognitive maps have been observed in the hippocampus, but their algorithmic form and the processes by which they are learned remain obscure. Here, we employed large-scale, longitudinal two-photon calcium imaging to record activity from thousands of neurons in the CA1 region of the hippocampus while mice learned to efficiently collect rewards from two subtly different versions of linear tracks in virtual reality. The r

When experts are immersed in a task, a natural assumption is that their brains prioritize task-related activity. Accordingly, most efforts to understand neural activity during well-learned tasks focus on cognitive computations and task-related movements. Surprisingly, we observed that during decision-making, the cortex-wide activity of multiple cell types is dominated by movements, especially “uninstructed movements”, that are spontaneously expressed. These observations argue that animals execute expert decisions while performing richly varied, uninstructed movements that profoundly shape neu

Working memory (WM) is central for cognition and is impaired in many brain disorders including those hypothetically mediated by NMDA receptor (NMDAR) hypofunction. Evidence suggests that network attractor states underlie WM maintenance and that failures are mostly caused by fluctuation-driven transitions, but direct evidence for this is still lacking. To investigate what makes WM fail we used a simple two-alternative delayed response task in which mice listen to a lateralized auditory stimulus and, after a variable delay (duration D=0-10 s), they have to lick the associated lateral port. Mice