Alex Piet

Congratulations to graduate student Alex Piet, whose paper in Neural Computation is now out (link here).

In this paper Alex uses two-node attractor network models to  figure out what neural mechanisms could lead to FOF (a rat cortical region) contributing to decision-making as the lab found in Erlich et al. eLife 2015 and Erlich et al. Neuron 2011. Alex’s results point to specific mechanisms in which the FOF contributes “post-categorization” memory, and make some predictions that Alex then confirmed as correct in a post-hoc analysis of the data.

Congratulations to ex-graduate student (now Dr.) Kevin Miller, who just had a paper published in Nature Neuroscience, on developing a planning task for rats together with computational methods to analyse the rats’ behavior, and using those to establish a role for the hippocampus in planning. Link to the paper is here.

Christine Constantinople

Ben Scott

Congratulations to Ben Scott and Christine Constantinople, co-first authors of a paper in Neuron describing how calcium imaging recordings during accumulation of evidence reveal that evidence is encoded in heterogeneous neural responses that have a wide diversity of timescales.

Congrats to recent Ph.D. graduate Dr. Kevin Miller!!! Kevin was a joint student with Carlos Brody and Matt Botvinick.

Congratulations to graduate student Alex Piet, who just had a paper accepted in Neural Computation on using modeling to distinguish roles of the FOF cortex in decision-making, as well as distinguishing between neural mechanisms by which the FOF could implement a post-categorization memory role. Link to paper will be added when it becomes available.

Ben Scott

Congratulations to postdoc Ben Scott (joint with Tank lab), who was named as one of the prestigious Next Generation Leaders of the Allen Institute for Brain Science .

Marino Pagan

Congratulations to postdoc Marino Pagan, who was awarded a prestigious Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain Postdoctoral Fellowship!

(Recent graduate Ann Duan also got one!)

Ann Duan

Congratulations to recently-graduated Ph.D. student Chun-Yu (Ann) Duan, who was awarded a prestigious Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain Postdoctoral Fellowship!  After graduating in summer 2015, Ann joined Ning-long Xu’s lab at the Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai.

(Current Postdoc Marino Pagan also got one!)

Christine Constantinople

Ben Scott

Congratulations to Ben Scott and Christine Constantinople, co-first authors of a paper in eLife describing how noise variance in pulsatile accumulation of evidence tasks appears to not scale linearly with the number of pulses, but as the square of the number of pulses. This has a number of important implications for how the noise might be generated.