Blog

How does the brain learn and represent categories? In a recent SWC Seminar, Dr Pieter Goltstein discussed his work exploring how the representation of a learned category in the mouse prefrontal cortex, as well as in higher visual areas, emerges over time.

In the first Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series (ENSS) talk of 2022, Dr Teresa Guillamón Vivancos shared her work on the input-dependent segregation of visual and somatosensory circuits in the mouse superior colliculus. In this Q&A she delves into the SWC ENSS initiative and shares more about her research in sensory perception.

In a SWC Seminar, Professor Alison Barth shared her work exploring synaptic changes in the brain during association learning. In this Q&A, she touches on how she came to research the topic, her most surprising findings, methodology, and more.

In a recent seminar at SWC, Assistant Professor Dmitriy Aronov shared his research studying the relationship between hippocampal activity and episodic memory in the black-capped chickadee, a specialist food-caching bird that stores food items at concealed locations and uses memories to retrieve their caches later in time.

Dr Dileep George recently gave a seminar at SWC where he described how treating space as a sequence can resolve many of the phenomena that are ascribed to spatial remapping. In this Q&A, he shares more about the Clone-Structured Cognitive Graphs model and the implications for neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

How does the brain use the presence or absence of reward to influence its decision-making? Recent SWC Seminar speaker Professor Ilana Witten shared her research on the midbrain dopamine system, its role in reinforcement learning, and state-dependent decision-making in the striatum.

In a recent SWC Seminar, Dr Nuria Vendrell Llopis shared her work on neural reinforcement across brain regions and cell-types. In this Q&A, she expands on what motivated her to pursue this line of research, her key findings, and implications of these findings on how we learn.