kari hoffman

608 Followers
164 Following
167 Posts

Cognitive neurophysiologist. Computational neuroethologist. I lead a lab at Vanderbilt University. We do: Many units. Some fields. No RF mapping. [She/her]

Knowledge enables judicious action, so how exactly do we gain knowledge from experience? What are the neural circuit dynamics that guide learning, and give rise to cognition and adaptive behaviors? What learning rules govern natural and artificial intelligence?

Research topicspopulation geometry, memory replay, sequence learning, concept learning, cell assemblies, oscillations, functional cell types
MethodsHiDensity wireless ephys, closed-loop stim, freely-moving NHP, machine learning
InstituteVanderbilt University
ORCIDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0560-8157

I find this article by Ferro just out in nature communication https://rdcu.be/dOzT2 is an interesting intersection between value-based decision-making, embodied cognition/active vision, and memory #reactivation or #reinstatement. Looking is doing some heavy lifting. And lookie there, I didn't even mention the #orbitofrontalcortex recordings they did!

It caught my eye (sorry) b/c some of the scanpath analysis our lab's done in the past suggests that prior to looking at a remembered, rewarded visual target, there's an uptick in #hippocampal #ripples (Leonard et al., Current Biol 2017), which are thought to signal the underlying reactivation of task-relevant activity patterns. And of course, there's work by a number of groups on memory guidance to rewarding/goal targets, that rely on hippocampal function. Ours based on an MTL amnesic: Yoo, et al., (2020). Long-term memory and hippocampal function support predictive gaze control during goal-directed search. Journal of Vision, https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.20.5.10 following from Chau et al., 2011, and the changes in scanpaths and pupil responses of aging adults and people with Alzheimer's disease, too: Dragan, M. C.,et al., (2017). Behavioural Brain Research, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2016.09.014

Where we choose to look says so much: see e.g. Kragel/Voss; Castelhano/Henderson, Wynn/Buchsbaum/Olsen/Ryan esp what Jordana Wynn followed up with on the scanpath reinstatements suggests a really intertwined relationship between memory, eye movements, and learning/decisions about goals. (forgive that I'm missing many others and pls add below!)

TL;DR The foraging decision-making folks and the memory-guided vision folks need to be increasingly up in each other's business.

Here's that Ferro link:
https://rdcu.be/dOzT2

@cogneurophys

Pssst! @saman just defended his PhD! 🎉🍾And that other place shouldn't get all the news, right? Right. So here's him during the defense (so many nice cell groups), and getting a surprise after the successful defense. He did a spectacular job! #phd #neuroscience #hippocampus #sciart

» #neuroscience has become so broad & technically sophisticated that individual researchers can no longer fully understand the technical foundations of their experiments.

The average #systemsneuroscience project, for example, requires in-depth knowledge of animal #surgery #mechanical #optical & #electrical #engineering #statistics and #computerscience «

https://www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neuroscience/why-and-how-we-need-to-professionalize-neuroscience/

#neurodon
#neurobuzz
#systemsneuro

Why (and how) we need to professionalize neuroscience

Moving away from the field’s do-it-yourself ethos and embracing professional technical expertise will make research more efficient.

The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives
If you liked our lab’s SFN poster from @saman, here’s the #preprint, just up! Laminar CA1 recordings in freely moving🐒 🛜 and that buys us some interesting fields in task and overnight #sleep, #inhibitory cell responses, and best of all: superficial/ deep #CA1 #pyramidalneuron #cellassemblies !! @cogneurophys
#hippocampus #neuroscience
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.06.570369v1.article-metrics
First glance: Bringing together some important concepts relevant for neural representation #memory #hippocampus and internally generated sequences #MemoryReplay @cogneurophys https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-023-00763-0
The generative grammar of the brain: a critique of internally generated representations - Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Neurobiological organizational principles suggest that a generative grammar exists in the brain. In this Perspective, Dragoi proposes how neural grammar enables specific experience-independent, internally generated patterns of activity acquired via spontaneous generative combination of pre-existing sequential motifs to support internally generated representations of experience in the hippocampus.

Nature
@uma_karma @beneuroscience @alicia_izquierdo @elduvelle_neuro @karihoffman Cognitive Neuroscience does not mean fMRI or Human Neuroscience (period). I have some history in that thread.
For the benefit of anyone who started following me recently, I am a biologist based in Canada that works on bird brains and behaviour. I often post photos of birds and other wildlife, but sometimes also brains and our lab's research. #neuroscience #ornithology #birds #brains #anatomy #academia
Hey all, just moved over here from a generic server, nice to see you all!
@karihoffman @biorxivpreprint @markgbaxter @cogneurophys As for the sex difference, we add to growing evidence of sex-dependent, frontocortical modulation of learning and decision making. See here from Ilana Witten’s group: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36646878/ and our own work in revision https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.03.535471v1
A neural substrate of sex-dependent modulation of motivation - PubMed

While there is emerging evidence of sex differences in decision-making behavior, the neural substrates that underlie such differences remain largely unknown. Here we demonstrate that in mice performing a value-based decision-making task, while choices are similar between the sexes, motivation to eng …

PubMed