The brain in the wild – probing naturalistic neuronal processing across species

Martha Havenith et Marieke Scholvinck Lab

Ernst Strüngmann Institure pour les neuroscience, en coopération avec le Max Planck Society

Résumé

Humans may not be good at multitasking – but their brains are! At any given moment, the brain deals with an enormous amount of sensory input and integrates it with multiple ongoing cognitive processes (e.g. attention) to generate continuous behaviour, which in turn shapes sensory experience. In contrast, most neuroscience experiments feature simplified stimuli, restricted behaviour (e.g. button presses), and extensive post-hoc averaging of neuronal responses.

In our talk, we will show some of the consequences of this classical approach for our (lack of) understanding of the brain, and present our lab’s mission to put the brain back in its ‘natural habitat’: We observe animals making foraging-related perceptual decisions in an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment – a task that is highly intuitive across species. We then extract detailed behavioural metrics to infer simultaneously ongoing cognitive processes such as fluctuating alertness and gradual rule learning, with the goal to continuously relate these ‘superimposed’ cognitive processes to neuronal population activity from brain areas along the visual decision-making hierarchy (V1, V4 and ACC). Finally, to understand how superimposed cognitive processing is implemented across species, we compare the neuro-behavioural dynamics of mice and monkeys in exactly replicated VR tasks. With this approach, we aim to contribute crucial insights into how cognitive processing functions in real life.

Invitées par Ede Rancz

Lundi 17 octobre 2022 à 11h – Salle de conférence de l’Inmed