Topic: natural behavior

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

Brain stimulation is a fundamental therapy for neurological diseases including Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor, and epilepsy. One key challenge in delivering effective brain stimulation is identifying the stimulation parameters (e.g. amplitude, frequency, and pulse width) that optimally change symptoms, behavior, or neural activity. Most clinical and translational studies use constant-frequency pulses of stimulation, but irregular pulse patterns or non-pulsatile waveforms may induce unique neural effects that could enable better therapy. Here, we comprehensively evaluate several optogene