Visual cues

…integration of vision and self-motion cues. Yet, it remains unclear how visual cues update spatial codes throughout the brain. One useful approach to examine this relationship is during reorientation, wherein a conflict between internal and external sense of direction and position is resolved. Recent work has shown that reorientation of head direction representation in the anterior dorsal thalamic nucleus (ADN), which functions as a ring-attractor, occurs at a variable temporal

…visual cues) is remarkable. Here, we investigated the representation of a set of surface boundary shapes rendered in different visual cues by macaque V1 and V2 neurons. Specifically, we investigated whether the geometric structure of the population code could support the formation of a cue-invariant representation of abstract surface boundary concepts. A visual concept refers to an abstract feature, such as a boundary or contour, that remains consistent across different

…for choosing the side with more visual cues. To determine mice’s underlying strategies on any trial, we f

…by integrating self-motion with local cues, which serve as anchors. A recent study in mice showed that network gain, a measure of population activity in the system, decreases during reorientations induced by changes in visual cues. The extent of this reduction in gain influences the dynamics of reorientation, with lowe

In complex environments, individuals need to be able to selectively focus on relevant information and to maintain it for later use. Attention and working memory (WM) represent two core cognitive abilities that are involved in cognitive control. Higher cognitive abilities have mostly been demonstrated in primates, yet corvid songbirds show remarkably similar skills. Therefore, we used jackdaws to study these instances of cognitive control. Two jackdaws were trained on a delayed estimation paradigm, tailored to probe attention and WM processes. One of two simultaneously presented sample colors h

Dot comparison tasks are a prominent method for investigating non-symbolic numerical processing and its development during childhood. In these tasks participants must select the more numerous of two dot arrays presented to them. Until now, it has been assumed that the developmental improvement observed in the dot comparison task during childhood is due to increasingly more precise internal numerical representations. However, this sharpening hypothesis was recently challenged by Piazza et al. (2008), who proposed that the improvement is governed by a so-called filtering process, i.e. children b

When auditory and visual cues both indicate a stimulus position, mice integrate these cues linearly (Coen et al., Neuron 2023). This strategy is optimal if the cues are independent and informative. What happens if the reward structure is changed to make this strategy suboptimal? Do mice continue to act additively, and do they learn to use the informative interactions between cues?Mice were trained to indicate the left-or-right position of audiovisual cues — which were presented alone (unisensory trials), simultaneously in the same location (coherent trials) or simultaneously in opposite locati

Animals improve their perception of the world by constantly integrating multi-modal sensory information they gather from the environment. The CNS weights and combines this information based on their reliabilities. However, cue reliability depends greatly on its salience, and it varies continuously while the animal moves through different environments. Our goal is to investigate the mechanisms adopted by animals while they regulate their behavior during multisensory behavioral control. Specifically, we study multisensory integration in Eigenmannia virescens, a species of weakly electric fish du

…mice requiring flexible processing of visual information about the external environment. In our experimental design mice are presented with extra maze visual cues of different levels of complexity - general contexts and salient landmarks. They are conditioned to navigate based on the visual cues, acting against the spontaneous tendency to alternate. The animals are presented with pseudo-random sequences of turns

…and it is anchored to stable visual cues in the environment. How specific brain microcircuits combine the stable maintenance of the HD signal as well as flexibility upon reorientation is unknown. Our goal is to understand the dynamical structure of the head direction neural network in the presubic

…reversal learning task (2 visual cues assoc

…developed a naturalistic audio-visual-motor virtual reality (VR) system for head-fixed mice. Real-time locomotion tracking was performed to provide artificial footstep sounds that were yoked to a precise phase of the step cycle, creating an ethological and experimentally manipulable form o

The salience of multisensory information plays a key role in the behavioral performance of animals. Specifically, Danio rerio (zebrafish) utilizes sensory feedback from multiple modalities to regulate their target tracking behavior during rheotaxis. We have previously shown that zebrafish tracks the trajectories of a D-shaped tube that obscure the flow during their innate rheotaxis. We investigate the impact of the quality of multisensory information on the target tracking performance of zebrafish within a custom-built swim tunnel. To achieve this, we use a transparent D-shaped tube to obscure

Animals benefit from a wide variety of sensory information while controlling their behavior. This seemingly simple, inherent process is one of the most challenging problems in neuroscience as animals regulate their behavior in closed loop. Thus, examining multisensory integration (MSI) necessitates the use of control-theoretic approaches and custom experimental systems that may shed light on their underlying mechanisms. Here, we built a custom refuge-tracking system for Eigenmannia virescens, a species of weakly electric fish. These fish hide within refuges and track their movement to remain h

Successful navigation requires the integration of egocentric (body-centered) and allocentric (world-centered) strategies. Previous studies have shown how these two systems could be integrated by coordinating different functional cell types in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC): grid cells, which are thought to serve as path integrators encoding egocentric information, and landmark cells, which encode allocentric information [1]. Theoretical work has shown how landmark cells could learn to serve as an error correction mechanism to grid cells via Hebbian plasticity, and experiments have found th

…its directional information with visual cues. In this presentation, we will show that a critically important visual cue is the distribution of starlight within th