Neuroscience Archives - Princeton Insights

September 29, 2021September 29, 2021

Attention, Awareness, and the Right TPJ

Review written by Amy Ciceu (2024)

Have you ever found yourself in deep thought in a public setting only to come to your senses and arrive at the uncomfortable realization that you’re making eye contact with another person? Such is the dilemma that faces us when we lose control of our awareness. Awareness—a module of behavior that allows us to be conscious of stimuli in our environment—is fundamentally distinct from but similar to attention—the process of selectively focusing the mind on certain stimuli at the expense of others. In an insightful new study led by graduate student Andrew Wilterson of the Graziano Lab at Princeton University, researchers used stimulus-prediction tasks and MRI imaging to investigate the interrelated nature of awareness and attention in the human brain.

September 2, 2021January 6, 2023

Decoding Mosquitoes with Zhilei Zhao

Episode 3 of Princeton Insights: The Highlights

In this episode of The Highlights, we're joined by Zhilei Zhao, a former graduate student in the McBride Lab of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. We discuss his experiences working in the lab during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as his study of the delicate neuroscience of mosquitoes and its potential impact on the fight against malaria and other insect-borne illnesses.

This episode of The Highlights was produced under the 145th Managing Board of The Daily Princetonian in partnership with Princeton Insights. Zhilei Zhao is a post-doc in the Goldberg Lab at Cornell University. He can be reached at zz367@cornell.edu.

Additional Resources:

Princeton Insights coverage: Infectious mosquitoes decode the unique smell of humans to pick their next meal

Original Paper: Chemical signatures of human odour generate a unique neural code in the brain of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes

Coverage by the Daily Princetonian

Credits:

Written/Hosted by Thiago Tarraf Varella GS and Olivia Duddy GS

Produced by Isabel Rodrigues

Original Insights Coverage by Olivia Duddy GS

Subscribe to The Highlights on Spotify, Podcast Addict, or wherever you get your podcasts! And subscribe to the Daily Princetonian to get the latest news at Princeton!

May 13, 2021January 6, 2023

Automating Observations with Talmo Pereira

Episode 2 of Princeton Insights: The Highlights

In this episode of The Highlights, we're joined by Talmo Pereira, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Neuroscience. Pereira holds a Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, one of the highest graduate honors given by the University. We discuss the ups and downs of grad school and how the software he is developing, Social LEAP Estimates Animal Poses (SLEAP), is working to unite neuroscience, ecology, and computer science.

RESOURCES:

Princeton Insights coverage: A computational model for automated tracking of socially-interacting animals.

Original Paper: SLEAP: Multi-animal pose tracking.

Coverage by the Daily Princetonian.

CREDITS:

This episode of The Highlights was produced under the 145th Managing Board of the Daily Princetonian in partnership with Princeton Insights. Talmo Pereira is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Neuroscience. He can be reached at talmo@princeton.edu.

Written/Hosted by Thiago Tarraf Varella GS and Andy Jones GS.

Produced by Isabel Rodrigues.

Original Insights Coverage by Andy Jones GS.

Subscribe to The Highlights on Spotify, Podcast Addict, or wherever you get your podcasts! And subscribe to the Daily Princetonian to get the latest news at Princeton!

August 20, 2020August 19, 2020

Alteration of gene activity in response to early life stress

Review written by Rebekah Rashford (PNI)

There is much consensus that negative stressful early life experiences impact the development of an individual. Numerous studies in humans have linked childhood adversity (e.g., loss of a caregiver, abuse, natural disaster, etc.) to an increased risk for depression and other psychiatric disorders in adulthood. In other words, the more an individual has experienced negative stressors in childhood, the more likely that individual is to develop depression or anxiety when they experience mild stressors in adulthood. This heightened sensitization and increased risk of mood disorders in humans has a parallel observation in rodents, specifically mice, which are used as model organisms in the discussed study. Principal Investigator Catherine Jensen Peña and colleagues at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai were interested in exploring the epigenetic effects of such early life stressors on reward circuitry in the brain. Throughout this work the authors posit, as does much of the early life stress (ELS) field, that there could be epigenetic mechanisms at work leading to the aforementioned risk of mood disorder development.

June 18, 2020June 19, 2020

Alignment of brain activity leads to increased learning in the classroom

Review written by Jess Breda (PNI)

Have you ever wondered how information is transferred from one brain to another? This process can occur in a variety of ways, from verbal storytelling to simple hand gestures, and across different backgrounds, such as a flight attendant instructing a first time flyer, or a casual conversation with a friend. We gain information from others on a daily basis. However, to study this on a biological level requires the complicated task of recording from two brains experiencing the same stimuli and aligning their activity in time.

June 12, 2020June 12, 2020

How do our previous choices inform our future decisions?

Review written by Renee Waters (PSY)

Humans tend to make individual choices based on a series of past experiences, decisions, and outcomes. Just think about the last time you had some terrible take out: you might decide not to eat at that particular restaurant again based on your previous experience. Maybe, you take the same route to work every day because, in the past, there is less traffic on this particular route. The effects that past experiences have on choices are often termed sequential biases. These biases are present everywhere, especially in value-based decision making. You might wonder, what are the neural mechanisms driving this phenomenon? Christine Constantinople, a former postdoc at Princeton University and now an assistant professor at NYU, began to explore this question along with colleagues in the Brody Lab at Princeton.

May 14, 2020May 14, 2020

Learning to control the brain

Review written by Eleni Papadoyannis (PNI)

How do humans control a complex system like the brain? Over the years, neuroscientists have discovered numerous methods to do exactly that. Applying chemicals, such as muscimol, can drive inhibition to shut down a brain region. Alternatively, shining light can selectively activate certain cell types through the photo-sensitive protein channelrhodopsin. Sending electrical impulses via electrodes in deep brain stimulation (DBS) can also control regional activity in humans. Causal manipulation of the brain not only offers incredible insight into hypotheses relating neural activity to behavior, but also serves as a clinical tool. Electrical and magnetic stimulation methods have been used as therapies for treating patients with a variety of diseases and disorders, such as using DBS to control motor disruption in Parkinson’s. A major limitation with many stimulation methods, however, is that the protocol is static while the brain is plastic—over time, brain responses to stimulation may no longer elicit what was intended as the brain naturally changes.

May 6, 2020May 6, 2020

Understanding visual navigation

Review written by Sara Camilli (QCB) and Adelaide Minerva (PNI)

As we go about our daily lives, we often do not consciously think about all the real-world landmarks that we use to position ourselves in space. Yet, as we walk to our local coffee shop or go for a jog in the park, our brain is continuously updating its internal representation of our location, which is critical to our ability to navigate the world. However, we also know that humans and a number of animals can update this internal representation of their position in space even in the absence of external cues. This phenomenon, known as path integration, involves interaction between the parietal cortex, medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), and hippocampus regions of the brain. Prior work has shown that grid cells in the MEC have firing fields that are arrayed in a hexagonal lattice, tiling an environment. Further, there is evidence of inputs to the MEC that encode the velocity at which an animal is moving, which can be used to update the animal’s internal representation of its position. Together, these features support a role of the MEC in path integration.