Funded Awards

Abstract To survive, living organisms must collect information about their environment and use it to select appropriate behaviors. However, information from the environment is often noisy, incomplete and ambiguous.

Abstract The cerebellum is critical for learning and executing coordinated, well-timed movements. The cerebellar cortex seems to have a particular role in learning to time movements.

We experience the world as a continuous sequence of events, but we remember the events as segmented episodes (e.g., my sister’s wedding). During encoding, we associate a sequence of relevant events and segment deviant events.

Project Summary: The decision to commence a new behavior often requires termination of the ongoing behavior. This implies that the many drive states produced by an animal impact not only the neural circuits underlying their directly associated behaviors, but also those of many other behaviors.

Project Summary Approximately, 40% of TBI patients discharged from the hospital will develop long-term disability with 70% experiencing chronic cognitive impairments that disrupt vocational, social, and emotional functioning.

Project Summary Animal brains integrate information to make crucial developmental and behavioral decisions.

Abstract The neurobiology of perceptual decision-making elucidates fundamental neural mechanisms of higher cognitive function, the understanding of which will inspire new strategies to treat neurological and psychiatric diseases affecting thought, perception and awareness.

Playing a game of chess, driving a car, or even reading this sentence all require that the brain retain and integrate information over short periods of time. This retaining and integration of information is accomplished by working memory.

The ability of our auditory systems to recognize target sounds in a mixture of other sounds is fundamental to normal healthy function and communication.

Perceptual decision-making is a complex cognitive function critical for health, reproductive success, and survival. In this process, an informed choice based on sensory evidence is made through engagement of circuits across the brain.

Project Summary (Overall: Cracking the Olfactory Code) Sensation drives perception, which informs decisions and actions. Olfaction is the main sense used by most animals to interact with the environment.

Despite substantial progress characterizing neural responses, it is particularly challenging to determine causal interactions within recurrently connected circuits due to the confounding influence of the interconnections.

Humans and animals often make decisions under uncertainty, whereby each decision affects not only the immediate reward gain but also longer-term information gain.

Throughout the brain, specialized systems carry out different but complementary functions, sometimes independently but often in cooperation. However, we do not understand how their activity is dynamically coordinated, and dysregulation of this is associated with many mental health conditions.

The overall goal of this project is to develop a reinforcement learning (RL) theory of motivation, understood here as motivational salience, and to test the conclusions of this theory using experimental observations obtained in the ventral pallidum (VP).

Neuromodulation is crucial for information processing throughout the brain. Neuromodulators influence neuronal function by acting through G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) to alter neuronal excitability and synaptic transmission, which can then affect circuit functions.

Project Summary Behavior is movement, and the effective and efficient execution of movement has served as a fundamental evolutionary force shaping the form and function of the nervous system.

The mammalian cortex plays a critical role in integrating multiple streams of information to guide adaptive behavior. For example, head direction (HD) information is combined with visual and spatial input in the mouse retrosplenial cortex (RSC).

Project Summary The overall premise of this proposal is to understand how the transformation of the signals from proprioceptive afferents within muscles leads to the representation of movements in somatosensory cortex.