When faced with a safe option and a risky option of similar expected value, individuals often show stable preferences: some consistently avoid risk, whereas others are more willing to accept uncertainty. How such individual risk preference is represented in neural circuits has remained poorly understood. Yaroslav Sych contributed to investigate how the brain encodes riskLire la suite « A hypothalamus–habenula circuit for individual risk preference »
Archives de l’étiquette : Yaro
Prefrontal–striatal projection neurons support the maintenance of working memory
Working memory is the ability to keep information available for a short period of time in order to guide behavior. It is essential for flexible cognition, but the circuit mechanisms that allow prefrontal networks to maintain information across a delay remain incompletely understood. Together with Fritjof Helmchen’s group at the University of Zurich, we investigatedLire la suite « Prefrontal–striatal projection neurons support the maintenance of working memory »
Brain-wide networks reorganize as mice learn a new task
Learning is not only a matter of strengthening activity in one brain region. Goal-directed behavior depends on distributed networks linking cortex, basal ganglia, thalamus, hippocampus and other structures. How these large-scale interactions reorganize as an animal learns a task remains a central question in systems neuroscience. In collaboration with Fritjof Helmchen and colleagues at theLire la suite « Brain-wide networks reorganize as mice learn a new task »
Making multivariate neural data analysis more reliable
Together with Fritjof Helmchen’s group at the University of Zurich, we addressed a methodological problem that becomes increasingly important as neuroscience moves toward large-scale, multi-region recordings: how can we reliably infer statistical relationships between several neural signals at once? Many analyses of neural data still rely on pairwise measures, such as correlations between two regionsLire la suite « Making multivariate neural data analysis more reliable »
How sensory information is routed through the cortex during short-term memory
When an animal makes a decision, sensory information must be transformed into an action — but this transformation is not instantaneous. Often, the brain has to hold information in short-term memory before acting on it. A central question is therefore how sensory signals travel through the cortex, where they are maintained during a delay, andLire la suite « How sensory information is routed through the cortex during short-term memory »
High-density multi-fiber photometry opens a window onto brain-wide circuit dynamics
Understanding behavior requires measuring how many brain regions interact at the same time. Yet most optical techniques historically faced a trade-off: they could record neural activity with good cellular or regional specificity, but only from a limited number of sites. This made it difficult to follow how distributed brain circuits coordinate activity during behavior. InLire la suite « High-density multi-fiber photometry opens a window onto brain-wide circuit dynamics »