Cooperative Agreements

Project Summary Animal brains integrate information to make crucial developmental and behavioral decisions. The brain adapts to life experiences by anatomical, functional, and molecular changes, but understanding the strategic value of these changes requires a comprehensive model that interconnects neural circuits and behavioral dynamics. To develop such models, it is useful to start with animals where entire brain circuits can be interrogated with full molecular, synaptic, and cellular resolution across development.

For many years brain-computer interfaces (BCI's) have been explored as a means of restoring communication to patients with Locked-In Syndrome (LIS), a devastating and often irreversible neurological condition in which cognition is intact but nearly all motor output from the brain is interrupted, effectively cutting off communication with the outside world. To date non-invasive BCI's (e.g.

PROJECT SUMMARY Cortical circuits generate dynamic patterns of activity. One of the great challenges of modern neuroscience is to determine the circuit architectures that generate such dynamics patterns, and understand their genesis and functional significance. Most research on brain dynamics focused on stable patterns of activity showing continuous transitions (e.g., oscillations). However, in recent years there has been an increased interest on transient dynamics, including the ones resulting from the sequential switching between metastable states.

Project Summary The goal of this proposal is to identify fundamental sensorimotor circuits associated with goal-oriented gripping movement by using high-dimensional biological, analytical and robotics technologies. To pursue this, we will study an animal that is extraordinary in many ways, the octopus. Our interest in this unique invertebrate is based on its well documented complex behavior repertoire that have shown to resemble those of vertebrates. Each of the eight arms contains an axial nerve which functions like the vertebrate’s spinal cord.

Project Summary Mechanistically linking network connectivity and the dynamics of neural networks to variation in the behavior of individuals is an overarching goal of neuroscience. Here we address this goal using techniques from network science to calculate functional networks that summarize pair-wise and higher order interactions between all recorded neurons.

Project Summary Navigating within an odor plume is a complex task due to unpredictable changes in odor concentration. The algorithms used by organisms to navigate the odor plume remain mysterious and how the brain solves this complex sensorimotor task key to escaping, mating and eating is unknown (1). The problem is challenging because it requires parallel monitoring of: 1) brain activity in multiple brain regions in the freely moving animal, 2) odor plume dynamics, 3) sniffing and 4) animal motion.

PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT Our current understanding of primate motion perception is often lauded as one of the great achievements of computational systems neuroscience. Due to its early successes in explicating the fundamentals of neural coding and relations between brain activity and perception, and further constrained by the practical limitations of the macaque model, it has remained rooted in conventional experimental approaches.

PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT Impaired consciousness during seizures has a major negative impact on quality of life for people with epilepsy. Consequences include risk of motor vehicle accidents, drowning, poor work and school performance, and social stigmatization. Impaired ictal/postictal arousal may also compromise breathing leading to sudden unexpected death in epilepsy.

Summary/Abstract Understanding the neural mechanisms underpinning cognition and behavior requires the ability to measure the dynamics and interactions of populations of neurons spread across many brain regions. Electrophysiological techniques provide the ability to measure this activity across superficial and deep structures at the speed of thought. Recent advances in electrophysiology have massively increased data quantity, quality, and ease of acquisition, thereby meaningfully reducing barriers to understanding the global brain circuits underlying behavior.

PROJECT SUMMARY To understand brain function, it is essential to identify how information is represented in neuronal population activity and how it is transformed by individual neurons as it flows through microcircuits. ​Two-photon (2P) microscopy is a core tool for this because it enables neuronal activity to be monitored at high spatial resolution deep within brain tissue in behaving animals​.