Blog

In his recent SWC Seminar, Dr Timothy Dunn presented a new approach for multi-animal 3D tracking and social behaviour analysis in rats. In this Q&A, Dr Dunn explains how his new approach differs from previous tools and the implications of 3D tracking on understanding autism and Parkinson’s.

In this Q&A Dr Tessa Montague, the last 2023/24 ENSS speaker, shares insights into her fascination with cuttlefish, the challenges and triumphs of studying them, and the innovative methods employed to understand their camouflage behaviour and neural mechanisms.

How can understanding synapse pruning in development help tackle neurodegenerative disease? In a recent SWC Seminar, Professor Carla Shatz demonstrated how looking at fundamental questions in neuroscience can lead to important discoveries about diseases such as Alzheimer’s. In this Q&A, she shares more.

What we know in our heads is not always smoothly translated into how we perform. In a recent SWC Seminar, Dr Kishore Kuchibhotla shared his lab’s work investigating the strategies and insights animals may use during sensorimotor learning. In this Q&A, he hints at how such findings could be implied in our own learning, his career trajectory, and how that’s informed his research direction.

How do we get to the same grocery store using different routes in the face of obstacles, such as road works? In the third ENSS talk of 2023/24, Dr Dylan Rich shared his work on understanding model-based decision-making in rats using mazes. In this Q&A, Dr Rich discusses historical roots of studying animal goal-directed behaviour, the design of experimental mazes, and the intriguing use of odour cues in learning paradigms.

Neural manifolds have become a cornerstone of neuroscience. Initially explored in locust perception, they now offer profound insights into brain function across species. SWC Seminar speaker Dr Juan Alvaro Gallego’s team have revealed patterns transcending intraspecies boundaries, shedding light on the brain’s inner workings.

In this Q&A with SWC Seminar speaker Dr Matthew Whiteway, we delve into the nuances of pose estimation, contrasting supervised and unsupervised approaches, discussing the novel aspects of the Lightning Pose algorithm, and exploring its potential impact on neuroscience research.

Learning in the real world is a highly complex process. There are many different aspects that influence an individual’s learning, such as context, feedback and the accumulation of past experience. In a recent SWC Seminar, Linda Wilbrecht, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, outlined her ongoing efforts to unpack this complexity in mice and potentially translate it back to human learning.