This week we have *Anne Churchland * from * Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory * giving a talk on *June 29 2018* at *10:30* in room *AA3195*
This talk may be streamed as usual here https://mila.bluejeans.com/1365483656/webrtc And you can sign up to meet the speaker here https://calendar.google.com/calendar/selfsched?sstoken=UVBVTVF0X25Nd09LfGRlZmF1bHR8ZWQ5MmNlYWMxODI4OWVkNmUzNGU3OTE4ZDExMGI0YTk
Don't even think about it! Decide to come to the tea talk and let your feet spontaneously guide the way. Michael
*TITLE* Spontaneous movements dominate cortical activity during sensory-guided decision making
*KEYWORDS *neuroscience, decision-making, neuro-imaging
*ABSTRACT* Animals continually produce a wide array of spontaneous and learned movements and undergo rapid internal state transitions. Most work in neuroscience ignores this “internal backdrop” and instead focuses on neural activity aligned to task-imposed variables such as sensory stimuli. We sought to understand the joint effects of internal backdrop vs. task-imposed variables. We measured neural activity using calcium imaging via a widefield macroscope during decision-making. Surprisingly, the impact of the internal backdrop dwarfed task-imposed sensory and cognitive signals. This dominance was comparable in novice and expert decision-makers and was even stronger in single neuron measurements from frontal cortex. These results highlight spontaneous and learned movements as the main determinant of large-scale cortical activity. By leveraging a wide array of animal movements, our model offers a very general method for separating the impact of internal backdrop from task-imposed neural activity.
*BIO* Anne K. Churchland received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, advised by Dr. Stephen Lisberger. She then did a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Michael Shadlen at the University of Washington in the Physiology and Biophysics Department. Her postdoctoral work focused on mechanisms of decision making in nonhuman primates and included both experimental and theoretical work. The latter was funded by a Pathways to Independence (K99) Award from the National Eye Institute. In 2010, she became an assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In starting her own laboratory, Professor Churchland began studying decision making using rodent models to take advantage of emerging tools for circuit dissection which are readily available in rodents. Since then, her laboratory has been a major player in bringing behavioral paradigms to rodents that have been successful in elucidating neural mechanisms in primates. These include perceptual decision making and multisensory integration. Most recently, she has teamed up with other 20 other researchers to for the International Brain Laboratory, a collaboration between theorists and experimentalists aiming to understand the neural computations supporting decision-making. Since joining Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Professor Churchland has been the recipient of awards from the McKnight Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Klingenstein-Simons Foundation, the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain, the John Merck Fund and the Chapman Foundations. In addition to her scientific work, Professor Churchland runs science outreach activities at public schools and co-directed the Undergraduate Research Program at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. She also maintains a blog about neuroscience research that is directed at a mainstream audience; its recent focus is on reviewing papers on the preprint server. Professor Churchland also funded anneslist.net, a resource highlighting women in systems and computational neuroscience. She received the 2017 Louise Hanson Marshall Special Recognition Award from the Society for Neuroscience for promoting diversity in the field and the 2012 Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Career Development Award for creativity in research prior to tenure.