The Knierim Lab of MBI and the LIMBS Lab of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (N. Cowan, PI) published a study in the journal Nature that showed how the brain translates movement information (e.g., speed and direction) into a position signal on the brain’s “cognitive map.” By placing rats in an augmented reality environment, lead […]

The Nielsen lab at MBI recently published a paper in Current Biology. This is the first paper demonstrating that ferret visual cortex handles the processing of complex motion information in a manner highly similar to the primate. More precisely, their findings demonstrate that in the ferret, motion processing evolves from a representation of local motion […]

The Knierim  lab of MBI published a paper in Science that discovered a new role of the Lateral Entorhinal Cortex (LEC)—one of the gateways of information into the hippocampal memory system.  The paper’s lead authors, Cheng Wang and Xiaojing Chen, showed that the LEC encodes experience from a first-person (egocentric) perspective, in contrast to the […]

Friday, November 16, 2018 at 4 p.m. Johns Hopkins University Mason Hall Auditorium, Homewood Campus Jack L. Gallant PhD UC Berkeley, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute A deep convolutional energy model of ventral stream areas V1, V2 and V4

MBI Researcher Veit Stuphorn and former graduate student Xiaomo Chen published a new paper on how the prefrontal cortex plays a causal role in the regulation of decision making in situations involving high risk.

Professors Ernst Niebur and Veit Stuphorn received a new grant from NSF titled “Human decision-making in complex environments.”  The project will investigate the neural circuits involved in representing variables involved in decision-making, integrating these variables to form subjective values, and selecting one of the options in multi-attribute decisions.  Niebur and Stuphorn will collaborate with Professor […]

The Knierim Lab of MBI was part of 2 successful applications in the 2018 competition for the Johns Hopkins Discovery Awards (https://research.jhu.edu/major-initiatives/discovery-awards/).  The first award, titled “Life Without a Dentate Gyrus: A New Mouse Model to Dissect Hippocampal Structure and Function,”  is a collaboration with the labs of Jeremy Nathans and Mikhail Pletnikov of the […]

The Kirkwood lab of MBI, in collaboration with the Lee Lab, published a new paper in Nature Neuroscience entitled “Two distinct mechanisms for experience-dependent homeostasis.”  The study addressed the homeostatic adjustments needed to maintain neuronal firing within an optimal range for information encoding. The principal findings, which revise previous conceptions of homeostatic plasticity, are (1) […]

MBI Assistant Professor Kristina Nielsen has recently received three major research awards. (1) A 5-year R01 grant from the National Eye Institute titled “Impact of visual experience on the development of the motion pathway in the ferret.”  This project will use electrophysiology, two-photon imaging and behavioral experiments in ferrets of different ages to investigate the […]

October 27, 2017 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm @ JHU Homewood Campus Nicole Rust, PhD Associate Professor Visual Memory Laboratory Department of Psychology University of Pennsylvania Multiplexing representations of what we are looking at and memories of whether we’ve seen it before