Topic: macaque monkeys

How the brain stores a sequence in memory remains largely unknown. We investigated the neural code underlying sequence working memory using two-photon calcium imaging to record thousands of neurons in the prefrontal cortex of macaque monkeys memorizing and then reproducing a sequence of locations after a delay. We discovered a regular geometrical organization: The high-dimensional neural state space during the delay could be decomposed into a sum of low-dimensional subspaces, each storing the spatial location at a given ordinal rank, which could be generalized to novel sequences and explain mo

As Socrates said that "I know that I know nothing," our mind's function to be aware of our ignorance is essential for abstract and conceptual reasoning. However, the biological mechanism to enable such a hierarchical thought, or meta-cognition, remained unknown. In the first part of the talk, I will demonstrate our studies on the neural mechanism for metacognition on memory in macaque monkeys. In reality, awareness of ignorance is essential not only for the retrospection of the past but also for the exploration of novel unfamiliar environments for the future. However, this proactive feature of

Technological advances have increased the availability of recordings from large populations of neurons across multiple brain areas. Coupling these recordings with dimensionality reduction techniques, recent work has led to new proposals for how populations of neurons can send and receive signals selectively and flexibly. Advancement of these proposals depends, however, on untangling the bidirectional, parallel communication between neuronal populations. Because our current data analytic tools struggle to achieve this task, we have recently validated and presented a novel dimensionality reducti

The brain continuously receives vast amounts of information from the rest of the body and the environment, only a fraction of which can be consciously processed and stored in memory. It is believed that hippocampal sharp-wave ripples tag memories that are relevant and should be remembered (Yang et al 2024). However, this selection of relevant information must occur already during sensory processing to avoid overloading the system with irrelevant information. The hypothesis of this project is that short bursts of high gamma activity, referred to as cortical ripples to distinguish them from hipp

Flexible routing of visual input signals has been linked to changing patterns of synchrony between gamma rhythms of distant neural groups. It has been proposed that attention increases distant gamma-band synchrony by increasing the gamma frequency of the sender group processing the attended stimulus. This stimulus is subsequently preferentially processed. However, the frequency of gamma activity fluctuates over time, varies between areas, and depends on stimulus characteristics, which may complicate entrainment between oscillators. Here, we investigate the relationship between the frequency of