Blog

In a recent SWC Virtual Seminar, Dr Katharina Schmack discussed her research exploring hallucination-like perceptions in humans and mice. In this Q&A, she elaborates on why it has traditionally been difficult to study disturbances in perception and her drive to find mechanistic treatment targets for psychotic disorders.

In a recent SWC Virtual Seminar, Dr John Krakauer shared his work exploring intelligent reflexes, as well as first- and second-level explainers for the cognitive-motor interface. In this Q&A he highlights how motor planning has been historically defined and how such definitions are undergoing a makeover.

How does the brain handle the trade-off between energy usage and information processing during food scarcity? In the first of this year’s Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series, Dr Zahid Padamsey discussed his work on how energy and information processing is regulated in the brain when food is limited.

Our understanding of animal behaviour has traditionally relied upon the results of artificial laboratory tasks. But increasingly, research groups around the world are recognising the need for more naturalistic studies of animals in ethologically-relevant contexts. In a recent SWC Virtual Seminar, Dr Ben Hayden shared his work on elucidating the neural basis of decision-making in these more complex settings.

To perceive discrete segments, such as syllables, words and sentences, we must parse continuous sensory input into meaningful units. But how does the brain do this? Recent SWC seminar speaker, Dr Lucia Melloni, explains her research understanding how events structure cognition and memory allowing us to go from continuous streams to segmented units.

How do we measure a thought? In cognitive neuroscience, researchers aim to relate neural activity to thoughts, which are notoriously difficult to measure. In his recent SWC Seminar, Dr Pitkow outlined how he uses a new scientific tool to learn an agent’s internal model and reward function by maximising the likelihood of its measured sensory observations and actions. In the following Q&A, Dr Pitkow explains how this tool extracts rational and interpretable thoughts of the agent from its behaviour.

How does the brain achieve the combination of past experience and sensory information? And what can we learn about the changes to this process in people with Parkinson’s? Dr Michele Basso recently gave a SWC Virtual Seminar where she outlined her research on these areas, and in the following Q&A she explains more.