Krystel Huxlin, Ph.D.James V. Aquavella Professor of OphthalmologyUniversity of Rochester Vision Restoration after Occipital Stroke: Challenging the Limits of Adult Plasticity In humans, occipital strokes invariably damage the primary visual cortex (V1), causing a loss of conscious vision over large regions of the visual field, referred to as cortically induced blindness (CB). This unfortunate “experiment […]
Kei M. Igarashi, Ph.DChancellor's Fellow & Associate ProfessorDepartment of Anatomy and Neurobiology, School of MedicineUniversity of California, Irvine Circuit mechanisms of associative memory and its disruption in Alzheimer’s disease Memory has multiple components: “what” memory (item/object), “when” memory (time) and “where” memory (space). Research in the past decades revealed neurons involved in spatial memory, including […]
Mark Churchland, Ph.D.Associate Professor, Dept. of NeuroscienceColumbia University in the City of New York From spikes to factors: understanding large-scale neural computations It is widely accepted that human cognition is the product of spiking neurons. Yet even for basic cognitive functions, such as the ability to make decisions or prepare and execute a voluntary movement, […]
Erin Hecht, Ph.D.Assistant Professor, Department of Human Evolutionary BiologyHarvard University Brain-behavior evolution in domesticated canids How do animals evolve new behavioral adaptations? Domestication offers a unique window into this question because it can involve strong selection pressure on a focused set of behaviors. In one set of studies, we are comparing brains of foxes from […]
Joshua Neunuebel, Ph.D.Associate Professor, Dept. of Psychological & Brain SciencesUniversity of Delaware Decoding Mouse Ultrasonic Communication During Social Behavior Communication plays an integral role in human social dynamics, and a myriad of neurodevelopmental disorders are characterized by abnormal social communication. Because of their genetic tractability, mice are emerging as an important model system for studying […]
Jan Engelmann, Ph.D.Assistant Professor, Dept. of PsychologyUniversity of California, Berkeley The sense of fairness in chimpanzees and children It is often argued that the sense of fairness consists in an aversion to unequal resource distributions. Standard accounts claim that chimpanzees react negatively to allocations in which they receive less than others, while children, from around […]
Terrence R. Stanford, Ph.D.Professor, Translational NeuroscienceWake Forest University School of Medicine Imposing urgency to generate insights into the neural mechanisms of perceptual decision-making and motor choice One of the most ubiquitous choices we make is that of where to look next. At 3-5 saccadic eye movements every second, the primate oculomotor system provides a unique […]
Elizabeth Quinlan, Ph.D.Professor and Chair, Department of NeuroscienceHerman and Rubinstein Chair of NeuroscienceUniversity of Wisconsin - Madison TBD Faculty Host: Hey-Kyoung Lee
Vincent Costa, Ph.D.Assistant Professor, Division of NeuroscienceOregon National Primate Research CenterOregon Health & Science University Disynaptic motivational circuits regulate decisions to explore or exploit Motivational circuits facilitate reinforcement learning and support computations relevant for solving the explore-exploit dilemma. But it has been difficult to dissect the neural circuits involved in exploration, since these choices rely […]
Hiroyuki Kato, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorDepartment of Psychiatry & Neuroscience CenterUniversity of North Carolina Chapel Hill Sensory Integration along the Auditory Cortical Hierarchy Our brain’s ability to parse overlapping sounds and reconstruct individual perceptual sound objects is essential in navigating acoustically complex environments. Despite ample evidence suggesting the critical roles of higher-order auditory cortices in integrating complex […]
Stefan Mihalas, Ph.D.InvestigatorAllen Institute for Brain Science Computing with complex components: How heterogeneous, nonstationary and noisy neurons and synapses contribute to the brain’s computational power While artificial neural networks have taken inspiration from biological ones, one salient difference exists at the level of components. Artificial networks are generally built with homogeneous, stationary and deterministic neurons […]
Neural Mechanisms Underlying Adult Ocular Dominance Plasticity: Hebbian or Homeostatic? Daniel Tso, PhDAssociate Professor of Neurosurgery,Neuroscience and Physiology,& Ophthalmology and Visual SciencesSUNY Upstate Medical UniversitySyracuse, NY Recent studies in adult humans have shown that short-term deprivation of one eye (STMD, 1-3hrs) dramatically shifts the balance in favor of this eye for over an hour afterwards. […]
