Jeffrey C. Erlich @jerlich@qoto.org
Come visit out poster Tuesday Oct 8 Morning!
LBA008.033 / LBA119 -
Task Context Shapes Short-Term Memory Localisation
Go see our very exciting results demonstrating the sensitivity of working memory strategies to task context. We made two variations of a classic 2AFC memory-guided orienting task : one that encouraged an egocentric strategy and one that encouraged an allocentric strategy. The results shocked us! M2 only involved in egocentric planning!
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/20433/presentation/31245
Excited to share a new paper from the lab:
Encoding of 2D Self-Centered Plans and World-Centered Positions in the Rat Frontal Orienting Field
Activity in the M2 predicts upcoming choices. But what does the activity represent? A gaze-centered plan? A world-centered goal? A specific movement? We asked rats to plan responses to different targets from different start position to find out!
Liujunli Li, Timo Flesch, Ce Ma, Jingjie Li, Yizhou Chen, Hung-Tu Chen and Jeffrey C. Erlich
Journal of Neuroscience 11 September 2024, 44 (37) e0018242024; https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0018-24.2024
Tweetthread: https://x.com/erlichlab/status/1835716087251406866
#neuroscience #prefrontal #premotor #planning #neuralnetworks
A-mazing.
"A robot-rodent interaction arena with adjustable spatial complexity for ethologically relevant behavioral studies"
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(23)01682-0
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/43/48/8074
Open Peer Review at J Neurosci!
Do you want to do a postdoc in London at the fabulous @SWC_Neuro ?
Do you have expertise in rodent behavior, neurophysiology and/or imaging?
Are you interested in economics? decision-making? Multiplayer games?
Get in touch! I will be at SFN and would love to come to your poster/talk.
#sfn #neuroscience #postdoc #SocietyForNeuroscience #SFN2023
https://erlichlab.org
https://sainsburywellcome.org
please boost and forward to anyone who might be interested.
Excited to share our _open access_ paper in Nature Neuroscience investigating the role of the rat frontal and parietal cortices in economic decisions under risk.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01461-x
We found that silencing the frontal orienting field (FOF) in rat secondary motor cortex increased risk-aversion and we could decode the value of the lottery on each trial from the population activity of the FOF.
#neuroscience @Nature #economics #Neuroeconomics #journal
p.s. We are looking to hire a postdoc to work in mice models of economic (esp. strategic) decisions. Message me if you will be at SFN and would be interested in working at the amazing @SWC_Neuro
We have open post-doctoral positions in the lab at the wonderful @SWC_Neuro . I will be at SFN , and would love to chat with candidates interested in the neurobiology of economic choice and/or spatial cognition. Check out some of our recent papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=kI5EI3AAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
PM me to set up a time to meet!
#SFN #neuroscience #jobs #postdoc
Who is your favorite illustrator for journal covers?
Cool paper from Shadlen lab: simulataneous recordings from LIP and SC reveal that SC terminated the decision process in random dot tasks.
cognition is neural computation that is not implement through one-hot encoding.
agree or disagree?
@NicoleCRust @markdhumphries @albertcardona
What's the best solution for opto + ephys commutator for open ephys system?
Today!!! Go visit 567.08 / UU14 - The rat frontal cortex encodes a value map in support of economic decisions under risk!
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10619/presentation/69748
related preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.19.469107v2
We read this very cool paper from Ayelet Sarel, Shaked Palgi, Dan Blum, Johnatan Aljadeff, Liora Las & Nachum Ulanovsky in our lab meeting today.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05112-2 (open access!)
They recorded from two bats flying back and forth in a 135m tunnel. They wirelessly recorded from the hippocampus of one of the bats and recorded the position and ultrasonic vocalizations of the bats. As the bats approach each other, they dramatically increase their vocalizations (presumably to avoid collision).
Hippocampal place cells are modulated by the relative position of the animals in complex ways, and this modulation is very rapid (turns on and off within a few seconds) as the bats approach each other.
I think the paper is quite a beautiful demonstration of how we can use ethological phenomena (like the sudden appearance of a conspecific) to better understand neural dynamics.
That said, I have a substantial concern with the paper. Hopefully, this toot might find its way to the authors - encourage them to join mastodon and reply :)
The authors analyze the neural activity relative to the tunnel , which they call "position" and with respect to the other bat which they call "interbat distance". However, the measure that they call "interbat distance" is not distance. Euclidean distance along a line is defined as +√((x₂-x₁)²). **It is always positive**. The authors _redefined_ distance to be the signed value x₂-x₁. This quantify is the position of x₂ relative to x₁, not the distance.
You might think that I'm being pedantic. Maybe the authors just thought it would be clearer to talk about "position" and "distance" instead of saying "tunnel position" and "position relative to other bat". However, they claim that "hippocampal neurons can rapidly switch their core computation to represent the relevant behavioural variables." If we change their wording to my wording, then what they have shown is that hippocamal neurons can rapidly switch the reference point that is being used to represent their current position, including using a reference point that is moving.
This is still a cool result. But is less novel. There is extensive work examining how hippocampus remaps or "reregisters" place cells when animals have to monitor multiple reference frames. A nice example is from [André Fenton's lab](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1000403). The authors cite Fenton's work but say that Fenton "reported switching between two position maps, whereas here we found switching from position representation to distance-by-position representation." And that, i think really underscores how their redefinition of distance influenced the way they think about their results.
What's the latest word on whether the FEF represents horizontal space more than vertical space?
The lab has two posters at SFN this year!
567.08. The rat frontal cortex encodes a value map in support of economic decisions under risk https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10619/presentation/69748
217.11. Distinct roles for rat premotor cortex in World-Centered versus Self-Centered Planning
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10619/presentation/83705
Hey #neuroscience! follow me! I'm @erlichlab on twitter... group leader at the #SWC , #ucl
