Congratulations to ex-postdoc Jeff Erlich, whose paper on inactivating PPC and FOF during accumulation of evidence came out in eLife.

A remarkably lucky year for for us at COSYNE! Although their overall acceptance rate was 60%, all 7 of the abstracts we submitted to the COSYNE conference this year were accepted. (And yes, 0.6^7 is small — 0.028 😉 .)  Furthermore, Ann Duan’s abstract was chosen for a talk. Looks like the lab will have a blast at COSYNE this year.  🙂   Have fun skiing, folks!

Congratulations to postdocs Tim Hanks and Chuck Kopec, whose paper in Nature came out in advance online publication today. In this paper on the neural basis of decisions driven by accumulating evidence, they use our rat gradual accumulation of sensory evidence decision-making task (Brunton et al., Science, 2013), and they

1. Show that rat cortical regions PPC and FOF have momentary-evidence-dependent ramping firing rates qualitatively very similar to analogous monkey cortices PPC and FEF. As in the monkey, these firing rate ramps are similar across the two regions.
2. Develop a new method to estimate tuning curves (i.e., plots of firing rate as a function of a variable of interest) for accumulated evidence.
3. Use their new method to show that despite the similarity in firing rate ramps, PPC and FOF have very distinct encodings of accumulating evidence: the PPC encodes the graded answer to “what is the value of the accumulating evidence”, whereas the FOF appears to have a more categorical encoding that can be roughly described as the categorical answer to “if the GO signal came now, which of the available decision outcomes should I choose?” This suggests that the FOF is more involved in response selection (choosing an available option, based on the accumulated evidence) than in gradual accumulation per se.
4. Use halorhodopsin (eNpHR3.0) to test competing predictions: if the FOF is involved in the gradual accumulation process, which occurs throughout sensory evidence accumulation, then perturbing it at any point during the sensory stimulus should affect behavior. In contrast, if the FOF is primarily involved in response selection, perturbing it should have an effect on the behavior only near the end of the sensory stimulus, which is when response selection will occur. The data support the latter interpretation.

Together, the optogenetic and electrophysiological data suggest that despite its ramping firing rates, the FOF is involved in response selection, not graded accumulation. We wonder whether the results could hold for monkey FEF as well, and hope someone will use the methods we developed here to find out.

The results clarify the particular contribution of the FOF to decisions driven by accumulation of evidence. We are excited about applying the methods developed here to other brain regions linked to such decisions, in an effort to elucidate the different contributions of different brain areas, and understand how the whole circuit fits together.

Postdoc Michael Yartsev will leave the lab in the summer of 2015 to start his own lab, working on bats, in the Department of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley. Congratulations to both Michael and Berkeley!

Bing, who graduated from her Ph.D. in the lab as recently as 2012, is now an Assistant Professor! She is in the Dept. of Biology and Institute for Neuroengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle.  Congratulations to both Bing and UW!

Postdoc Jeffrey Erlich becomes an alumnus of the lab, as he starts his own lab at NYU Shanghai. Congratulations to both Jeff and NYU Shanghai!

Shanghai is an exciting city, with a burgeoning neuroscience community, and great support. Interested in great neuroscience in China? Jeff is looking for students and postdocs.

Christine Constantinople, a joint postdoc in the Brody and Tank labs, started her prestigious Helen Hay Whitney Foundation postdoctoral fellowship on April 1. These are among the most prestigious postdoctoral fellowships in the life sciences, so they are extremely competitive: out of 531 applicants, Christine was one of only 24 who received the award.  Congratulations Christine!

Great news for Michael Yartsev! His Ph.D. work has earned him both SFN’s 2013 Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience and Science Magazine’s 2013 Eppendorf Prize for Neurobiology. Part of the Eppendorf prize is that the essay Michael submitted for it gets published in Science. Congratulations Michael!!!

Michael adds these prizes to his previous collection of two prizes from the International Society for Neuroethology, the 2012 Young Investigator Award and the 2102 Capranica Prize.

Ben Scott, a postdoc in the Brody and Tank labs, has developed a system for voluntary head-fixation in rats (Scott, Brody, and Tank, Neuron 2013). Based on the principles of kinematic mounts often used in optics, the system allows precise re-positioning of a rat’s head, across multiple trials of a behavior, with an accuracy of a few microns. This enables cellular-resolution calcium imaging in behaving rats. In addition, because the rats engage the system voluntarily, the approach is amenable to high-throughput training. Thanks to Ben’s work, we can now use the lab’s training facility to teach voluntarily head-fixing rats to perform complex cognitive behaviors requiring many months to train. We are using this is to perform the first cellular-resolution imaging assays of neural activity involved in higher cognitive processes.

Graduate student Ann Duan has been awarded a prestigious International Student Research Fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Only 50 or so of these fellowships are awarded each year– they are extremely competitive.

Congratulations Ann!