This Project Grant award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) provides $553,788 to Northwestern University to investigate the microcircuit mechanisms underlying the distributed cortical contributions to working memory. The research aims to understand how genetically identified cell types in the primary visual cortex (V1) and premotor cortex (M2) interact to generate different activity timescales and recruitment patterns...
This three-year, $2.288 million project grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse will support the development of new analytic tools and computational frameworks to understand complex spatiotemporal brain activity from large-scale, multi-modal neuroscience data. Specifically, the New York University School of Medicine will utilize electrophysiological recordings and calcium imaging data to decode representations of spatial and task information in hippocampal...
This cooperative agreement from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke will fund $8,473,173 for research exploring the neural population codes that support context-dependent behavior. The funding will support a collaborative project between New York University, Riken, and Ecole Normale Superieure from April 15, 2021 through March 31, 2024 under the National Institutes of Health's Extramural Research Programs in the Neurosciences and Neurological Disorders program (CFDA...
This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program, totaling $722,109, supports a collaborative research project between computational and experimental neuroscientists at Brown University. The project aims to investigate the role of brain waves in the prefrontal cortex during decision-making and categorization tasks, with the goal of uncovering the mechanisms and meaning of brain rhythm frequency shifts. The...
This $1,999,635 project grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NIH NINDS) will fund research into understanding feedforward and feedback signaling between neuronal populations. The grant was awarded to Albert Einstein College of Medicine on March 15, 2022 for a period ending February 28, 2025. The project aims to advance understanding of how feedforward and feedback signaling work together in the visual system by analyzing...
This $2,965,125 federal Project Grant award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) aims to determine how neuronal population dynamics during non-rapid-eye-movement sleep (NREMS) regulate cortical-striatal coupling and impact behavioral automaticity versus flexibility. The project, titled "ROLE OF COORDINATED MULTI-AREA REACTIVATIONS DURING TRANSITIONS BETWEEN AUTOMATIC AND FLEXIBLE BEHAVIORS", is funded under the 21st Century Cures Act - Brain Research...
This Project Grant award of $454,385 from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), under the Extramural Research Programs in the Neurosciences and Neurological Disorders (CFDA 93.853) program, supports research at New York University (NYU) to investigate the cerebellum's role in perceptual timing behavior. The goal is to provide evidence of a causal link between the activity of lateral cerebellar neurons and the perceived duration of sensory stimuli, as well as...
This $1,761,170 project grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke will support research into feedback and feedforward gating of sensory signaling through timing in the thalamocortical loop. The grantee, Georgia Tech Research Corporation, will utilize optogenetic and electrophysiological techniques to precisely measure and manipulate elements of the thalamic-cortical circuit in the whisker somatosensory pathway of awake mice. Specifically, the research aims to...
This $594,286 Project Grant award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), under the Extramural Research Programs in the Neurosciences and Neurological Disorders (CFDA 93.853) federal grant program, will support research to explore the functional logic of local circuits in auditory and parietal cortices. The key research objectives are to: Compare the spatial and functional structure of excitatory impacts on local populations in primary auditory cortex (A1) and...
This three-year Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Integrative Organismal Systems, totaling $550,000, will fund research examining corticocortical communication in the brain under different network states. The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, operating as the Clinical Practices of the University of Pennsylvania, will investigate how visual responses are transmitted between local networks in layers 2-3 of primary visual cortex when the brain is in gamma...
TUNABLE MULTI-TIMESCALE CORTICAL DYNAMICS: FUNDAMENTAL THEORY AND PRACTICAL TOOLS - HEALTHY CEREBRAL CORTEX FUNCTION REQUIRES POPULATION NEURAL ACTIVITY THAT IS COORDINATED ACROSS A WIDE RANGE OF TIMESCALES. NEURAL CIRCUITS MUST OPERATE WITH QUICK, MOMENTARY SENSORIMOTOR RESPONSES (~10 MS), BUT ALSO MAINTAIN PERSISTENT ACTIVITY FOR SHORT-TERM MEMORY (~10000 MS), AND MANY OTHER TIMESCALES BETWEEN THESE EXTREMES. DEPENDING ON BEHAVIORAL CONTEXT, FASTER OR SLOWER TIMESCALES MAY BE MORE USEFUL, BUT THERE IS NO SINGLE MOST-IMPORTANT TIMESCALE. THE STATUS QUO IN COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE IS TO PICK ONE PARTICULAR FUNCTION (USUALLY ASSOCIATED WITH ONE, OR A FEW PARTICULAR TIMESCALES) AND THEN BUILD THEORY AND EXPERIMENTS WHICH ADDRESS IT. WHILE USEFUL, THIS COTTAGE INDUSTRY APPROACH LEAVES OPEN AN IMPORTANT KNOWLEDGE GAP; WE LACK A UNIFIED THEORY THAT ACCOUNTS HOLISTICALLY FOR THE MANY TIMESCALES THAT COEXIST IN REAL CORTICAL CIRCUITS. HOW CAN A SINGLE, LOCAL POPULATION OF CORTICAL NEURONS GENERATE DYNAMICS WITH A BROAD REPERTOIRE OF COEXISTENT TIMESCALES? HOW IS THE REPERTOIRE OF TIMESCALES TUNED TO ACCOMMODATE BEHAVIORAL CONTEXT? HERE WE PROPOSE TO DEVELOP FUNDAMENTAL THEORY AND DATA ANALYTIC TOOLS TO ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS AND TO DIRECTLY TEST IMPORTANT HYPOTHESES IN AWAKE MICE. OUR PRELIMINARY THEORETICAL EFFORTS AND EXPERIMENTAL DATA STRONGLY SUPPORT THE FOLLOWING HYPOTHESES WHICH FRAME OUR PROPOSED WORK. CENTRAL HYPOTHESIS 1: NEURAL POPULATIONS IN AWAKE CORTEX MANIFEST WITH A VERY BROAD REPERTOIRE OF TIMESCALES BECAUSE THEY OPERATE NEAR CRITICALITY, WHICH IS A DYNAMICAL REGIME DEFINED BY AN INFINITE RANGE OF SCALE-INVARIANT TIMESCALES. CENTRAL HYPOTHESIS 2: CHANGES IN AROUSAL AND BEHAVIOR TUNE THE CORTICAL OPERATING REGIME AROUND CRITICALITY, ALLOWING THE SYSTEM TO SHIFT THE REPERTOIRE OF TIMESCALES TO BE FASTER OR SLOWER. OUR PROPOSED WORK WILL BE ORGANIZED INTO FOUR SPECIFIC AIMS. IN AIM 1, WE WILL DEVELOP A TEMPORAL RENORMALIZATION GROUP THEORY (TRG) FOR DESCRIBING AND EXPLAINING THE ORIGINS OF MULTIPLE TIMESCALES IN LOCAL CORTICAL POPULATION SPIKE RECORDINGS. OUR THEORY WILL BUILD UPON TRADITIONAL RG FROM PHYSICS, BUT SPECIFICALLY MODIFIED FOR SPATIALLY LOCAL, HIGH-DENSITY RECORDINGS WITH SINGLE CELL RESOLUTION. IN AIM 2, WE WILL GENERATE AN EASY-ACCESS DATA ANALYSIS TOOLBOX FOR INVESTIGATING THE TIMESCALE REPERTOIRE OF SPIKE RECORDINGS. IN AIM 3, WE WILL DETERMINE HOW TIMESCALE REPERTOIRE SHIFTS WITH VIGILANCE AND BEHAVIORAL CONTEXT. IN AIM 4, WE WILL IDENTIFY BIOPHYSICAL MECHANISMS WHICH IMPACT THE TIMESCALE REPERTOIRE. OUR THEORY AND TOOLS WILL PERFORM FAIR COMPARISONS OF MULTIPLE COMPETING THEORIES (CRITICALITY AND OTHERS) BASED ON A HOLISTIC VIEW OF CORTICAL TIMESCALES. WE EXPECT OUR RESULTS TO UNIFY AND DIFFERENTIATE THE ZOO OF DIFFERENT POSSIBLE EXPLANATORY MODELS FOR THE TIMESCALE REPERTOIRE OF CORTICAL POPULATION DYNAMICS.