We are happy to announce the launch of a new format for our “Emergent Scientists Seminar Series“.
In this renovated format, we will feature online talks by two PhD students at the end of their doctorate or postdocs in their very first years, from Oxford but also any other university, to present their research on a specific topic in Neuroscience.
The first “Emergent Scientists Seminar” will be on Friday, 17th July at 4 pm, focused on the Neural Coding in the Auditory Cortex. Two young researchers, Dr Jennifer Lawlor (postdoc at John Hopkins University) and Aleksandar Ivanov (DPhil student at the University of Oxford) will present their work in this field. The event will be followed by a virtual pub chat with the speakers at 5.15 pm and everybody is welcome to join.
Further details on how to join both sessions will be sent through our mailing list! To join our mailing list, follow the instructions here https://cortexclub.com/join-us/
If you are a final year PhD student or a postdoc in your very first years and would like to showcase your research, WE ARE OPENING A CALL for “Emergent Scientists Seminars” happening between October and December 2020. To be considered for being one of the next speakers in the series, please apply via this page: https://cortexclub.com/emergent-scientists-seminar-series/ .
Applications coming from any research institution and neuroscience topic are welcome.
On Thursday July 9th, Prof. Phedias Diamandis will be giving a talk on ‘Machine reasoning in histopathologic image analysis’.
The talk will be hosted at 5.30 pm, while at 6.45 pm we will host a virtual pub chat with the speaker. Further details on how to join both sessions will be sent through our mailing list! To join our mailing list, follow the instructions here https://cortexclub.com/join-us/
On Friday July 3rd, Prof. Danielle Bassett will be giving a talk on ‘Networks thinking themselves’.
The talk will be hosted at 4 pm, while at 5.15 pm we will host a virtual pub chat with the speaker. Further details on how to join both sessions will be sent through our mailing list! To join our mailing list, follow the instructions here https://cortexclub.com/join-us/
Abstract:
Human learners acquire not only disconnected bits of information, but complex interconnected networks of relational knowledge. The capacity for such learning naturally depends on the architecture of the knowledge network itself, and also on the architecture of the computational unit – the brain – that encodes and processes the information. Here, I will discuss emerging work assessing network constraints on the learnability of relational knowledge, and the neural correlates of that learning.
On Tuesday June 30th, Donald Katz will be giving a talk on Cortical population coding of consumption decisions.
The talk will be hosted at 4 pm, while at 5.15 pm we will host a virtual pub chat with the speaker. Further details on how to join both sessions will be sent through our mailing list! To join our mailing list, follow the instructions here https://cortexclub.com/join-us/
Abstract:
The moment that a tasty substance enters an animal’s mouth, the clock starts ticking. Taste information transduced on the tongue signals whether a potential food will nourish or poison, and the animal must therefore use this information quickly if it is to decide whether the food should be swallowed or expelled. The system tasked with computing this important decision is rife with cross-talk and feedback—circuitry that all but ensures dynamics and between-neuron coupling in neural responses to tastes. In fact, cortical taste responses, rather than simply reporting individual taste identities, do contain characterizable dynamics: tastedriven firing first reflects the substance’s presence on the tongue, and then broadly codes taste quality, and then shifts again to correlate with the taste’s current palatability—the basis of consumption decisions—all across the 1-1.5 seconds after taste administration. Ensemble analyses reveal the onset of palatability-related firing to be a sudden, nonlinear transition happening in many neurons simultaneously, such that it can be reliably detected in single trials. This transition faithfully predicts both the nature and timing of consumption behaviors, despite the huge trial-to-trial variability in both; furthermore, perturbations of this transition interfere with production of the behaviors. These results demonstrate the specific importance of ensemble dynamics in the generation of behavior, and reveal the taste system to be akin to a range of other integrated sensorimotor systems.
