Sloan-Swartz Centers for Theoretical Neurobiology
Annual Meeting 2008
Princeton University, July 19-22, 2008
Program (as of 19 July 2008)
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Tuesday, July 22
9:30 Talk Sessions: Vision and Coding
9:30 Xaq Pitkow (Columbia)
Benchmarks for vision: probabilities of feature conjunctions in naturalistic images
9:50 Stephanie Palmer (Princeton) Predictive information in the retina
10:10 Sergei Gepshtein (Salk) Economics of visual sensitivity and sensorimotor behavior
10:40 Nava Rubin (NYU) A Hierarchy of temporal receptive windows in human cortex
11:00 Break
11:05 Talk Sessions: Topology, Development, and Structure
11:15 Mitya Tsigankov (CSHL)
Can formation of ocular dominance pattern be instructed by molecular labels?
11:30 Florin Albeanu (CSHL)
Precision and diversity of the odor map on the olfactory bulb of mice and rats
11:45 Moritz Helias (BCCN Freiburg) From correlation detection towards structural plasticity in cortical networks
12:00 Ping Wang (Salk) Synchrony and stochasticity in thalamocortical neural coding
12:30 Lunch
2:00 Talk Sessions: Rodent Behavior and Learning
2:00 Mark Laubach (Yale)
Dynamic modulation of neural activity following changes in stimulus-reward association
2:15 Santiago Jaramillo (CSHL)
Effects of expectation on the processing of auditory stimuli
2:30 Alfredo Fontanini (Brandeis)
Active and passive sensing differentially modulate sensory responses
2:50 Loren Frank (UCSF)
A neural mechanism for the generation of sparse, informative
representations in the hippocampus
The hippocampus is essential for animals’ abilities to learn about and navigate through space, and individual hippocampal principle neurons show place specific firing during exploration. Not all principle neurons are active in any given environment, however, and it is not yet clear how active neurons are selected out of the available pool. Here we show that hippocampal area CA1, but not upstream area CA3, emits twice as many spikes in novel as compared to familiar environments. The overall population rate and the number of active cells decreases as the environment becomes familiar, but the decline in rate is not uniform across neurons. Instead, the activity of cells with peak spatial rates above ~12 Hz is enhanced, while the activity of cells with lower peak rates is suppressed. The result is that, after several days of experience in the environment, the active CA1 population consists of a relatively small group of cells with strong spatial tuning. This process is not evident in CA3, indicating that a region-specific selection process operates in CA1 to create a sparse, spatially informative population of neurons.
3:05 Break
3:35 Yuri Dabaghian (UCSF)
Topological structure of the hippocampal code
3:50 Sen Cheng (UCSF)
A theoretical analysis of neurogenesis and transient memory storage in the dentate gyrus
4:05 Uri Rokni (Harvard)
Compensating fixational eye movements: A network model
4:25 Break
4:40 - 5:25 Invited Speaker: Randy Gallistel (Rutgers)
Information in “Associative” Learning
Meeting concludes
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