Topic: macaques

Understanding how internally driven cognitive processes (COPs) give rise to behavior in different species is one of the key challenges in systems neuroscience. Traditionally, neuroscience has aimed to isolate individual COPs by simplifying sensory stimuli and behavioral readouts. Yet in natural behavior, several COPs can co-occur, often with overlapping neural representations. The dynamics of such superimposed COPs are yet to be understood, as well as the extent to which they generalize across species. To tackle this question, we developed a naturalistic Virtual Reality setup in which two spec

A central problem in neuroscience is to understand how areas in the brain communicate. Inputs to brain areas largely influence the intrinsic dynamics of each region, which shapes ongoing computations. Hence, characterizing how inputs drive different population responses is key to understanding how brain circuits are controlled to generate different behaviors. To this end, we developed an inter-areal patterned microstimulation (uStim) protocol that allowed us to finely manipulate the activity of a neural population in one brain area while simultaneously recording the activity of a second popula

Space can be a limited resource. Many species including humans, evolved a compromise regulating space sharing and its occupancy based on social determinants. For example, students in a classroom tend to sit close to their friends, keeping the same spots across days, revealing the social structure in the classroom. This place preference suggests that factors such as social hierarchy and affiliation can shape space utilization; contrasting with classical random walk models of agents moving at random in any given direction. Here, we asked whether spatial occupancy of macaques (Macaca fascicularis

While most experimental tasks aim at isolating simple cognitive processes to study their neural bases, naturalistic behaviour is often complex and multidimensional. I will present two studies revealing previously uncharacterised neural circuits for decision-making in macaques. This was possible thanks to innovative experimental tasks eliciting sophisticated behaviour, bridging the human and non-human primate research traditions. Firstly, I will describe a specialised medial frontal circuit for novel choice in macaques. Traditionally, monkeys receive extensive training before neural data can be

According to the theory of predictive processing, expectations modulate neural activity so as to optimize the processing of sensory inputs expected in the current environment. While there is accumulating evidence that the brain indeed operates under this principle, most of the attention has been placed on mechanisms that rely on static coding properties of neurons. The potential contribution of dynamical features, such as those reflected in the evolution of neural population dynamics, has thus far been overlooked. In this talk, I will present evidence for a novel mechanism for predictive proce