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Fall Semester 2008-2009

10 September 2008:  Organizational Meeting

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• Manns, Howard and Eichenbaum (2008). Gradual Changes in Hippocampal Activity Support Remembering the Order of Events. Neuron 56, 530-540.

25 September 2008:  D. Smith

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• Hagmann, Cammoun, Gigandet, Meuli, Honey, Wedeen, Sporns (2008). Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex. PLOS Biology. 6(7):1479-93.

Spring Semester 2008-2009

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Today several people asked me to send out a 2005 paper (Fusi, Drew, Abbott 2005, Cascade models of synaptically stored memories_)_ showing why a variety of memory maintenance mechanisms with different timescales are better than having just one or two simple memory maintenance mechanisms.  Here it is._  There's also a followup paper showing why it didn't matter that they used synapses with binary weighting in the 2005 paper:_  Stefano Fusi & L F Abbott  "Limits on the memory storage capacity of bounded synapses"  Nat Neuro 10 (4) April 2007 p 485.

17 November 2009: SiWei Luo

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Please contact Thomas Cleland with any questions (David Smith is on walkabout this semester).  BCS meeting archive .

26 January 2010:  Organizational Meeting

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• Hasselmo, Giocomo, and Yoshida (2009).  Cellular dynamical mechanisms for encoding the time and place of events along spatiotemporal trajectories in episodic memory.  Behavioral Brain Research. 

16 February 2010:  Patrick Gill

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• Mahon, Vautrelle, et al (2006). Distinct patterns of striatal medium spiny neuron activity during the natural sleep-wake cycle.  J. Neuroscience.

9 March 2010:  Sasha Devore

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• Kalenscher et al. (2010). Reward-associated gamma oscillations in ventral striatum are regionally differentiated and modulate local firing activity.  Journal of Neurophysiology.

6 April 2010:  Guoshi Li

• David et al (2009).  Specific entrainment of mitral cells during gamma oscillation in the rat olfactory bulb.  PLoS Computational Biology. 

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• Results from planar-array multielectrode slice recordings of gamma oscillations in the mouse olfactory bulb.

27 April 2010:  NO MEETING

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NOTE: It's coming time to start thinking of next semester's overarching theme. One possibility is "Synaptic plasticity", a broad topic that could include molecular mechanisms as well as population-level patterns of perceptual learning, LTP as well as neuromodulator-regulated changes.  As a BCS topic, of course, the intent would be to choose approaches relevant to behavioral, computational, and systems-level questions.  The relevance/necessity of bidirectional regulation of plasticity would be a prime topic.  Following up on synchrony-dependent timing properties of synaptic plasticity mechanisms would establish a common thread with this semester's theme.  Another, somewhat related theme is a neuroscience version of statistical learning:  anything from perceptual learning to Bayesian representations of coding to temporal difference learning to dopamine (Schultz model) to the underlying synaptic rules that give rise to relevant population level learning properties to optimality of the Bayesian brain.  Thoughts?  other ideas?  Send them to Thom or bring them up at BCS. 

Another idea:  Mechanisms of memory consolidation and reconsolidation -- perhaps a more focused version of "synaptic plasticity" as above.  These topics are much more well understood and diverse than they were even a few years ago, and they are leading to a number of exciting hypotheses about systems and behavioral integrative mechanisms.  For example, see Nader & Einarsson (2010) Ann NY Acad Sci 1191:27-41, as well as Jonathan L.C. Lee's recent Nature Neuroscience paper (2008) and Trends in Neurosciences opinion (2010).  

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The overarching theme this semester is Systems of neuronal representation and learning .  Adhering to this theme is not required, but is strongly recommended.  Please interpret it broadly. It is intended to include such diverse topics as:  the systematic regulation of synaptic plasticity, Bayesian representations (including sensory representations as probability estimates), Bayesian and/or energetic optimality in neural encoding or transmission, perceptual learning, decision-making (including reward harvesting), temporal difference learning/dopamine (Schultz model), synaptic rules that give rise to systems-level learning properties.

31 August 2010:  Organizational Meeting

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Please contact Thomas Cleland or David Smith with any questions.

25 January 2011:  Organizational Meeting

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Please contact Thomas Cleland or David Smith with any questions.

4 September 2012:  Organizational Meeting

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• Stephana C, Wilkinson A, Huber L (2012).  Have we met before? Pigeons recognise familiar human faces.  Avian biology research 5(2):75-80.

Spring Semester 2013-2014

For Spring Semester 2013-2014, the Behavioral, Computational, and Systems Neuroscience (BCS) Journal Club will meet on Tuesdays from 11:45 to 1:00 pm in Uris Hall 205.

Papers and notes from previous semesters can be found in the BCS meeting archive .

The semester's theme is still Attention , from both a neurobiological and cognitive perspective. The goal, of course, is to cross-reference and cross-challenge the two so as to come up with an integrative and useful understanding of the field. How can human attentional tasks best be studied using animal models? What, if any, is the special importance of cholinergic neuromodulation to attention? Is "attention" still a useful concept? As always, please interpret BCS themes broadly -- they are meant to focus rather than to exclude.

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BCS will continue its "minimal Powerpoint" policy, in place since Fall 2011. In order to make discussions more engaging and less formal, we encourage presentations to be primarily "chalk talks", in which concepts are sketched rather than figures shown. Mixed media are OK too, in which a complex figure can be put onto a slide or simply zoomed up on from the PDF file of the original paper, but drawing the figure tends to convey stronger understanding than does flashing a figure up on the wall. We also emphasize that you do not have to present papers in their entirety, much less multiple papers. Having everybody read up thoroughly on something small and focused usually makes for a better experience than everybody skimming one or more full papers. You may want to present only one exciting concept, exemplified by one or more figures drawn from one or more papers. That's great. Focus on the concepts, and don't feel compelled to master every detail of every paper that you want to include in your presentation. Do what you feel is best, but please do not just put the figures of a paper into a slide show and describe the paper.

That said, presenting your own work is always welcome, and in this case often it will be in Powerpoint format and formally organized. Not a problem.

To add yourself to the BCS-L mailing list, send a plain-text email to bcs-L-request@cornell.edu with the body of the message saying simply join. The subject line doesn't matter. Sending the message leave instead will unsubscribe you from the list. See Cornell's Lyris HowTo page for further details.

You can enroll in the BCS Journal Club for graduate or undergraduate credit (1 CR, S/U) as a Topics in Biopsychology seminar: PSYCH 6271. The course requires that you present at least once during the semester and participate actively overall. You are welcome to attend without enrolling, of course, but we do appreciate you enrolling if you plan to attend the whole semester and to present.

Please contact Thomas Cleland or David Smith with any questions.

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28 January 2014: Organizational Meeting

• No readings. Please come prepared to choose a day to present from the many opportunities below.

4 February 2014: Group discussion of Charles Schroeder's work - no designated presenter.

• J. Besle, C. Schevon, A. Mehta, P. Lakatos, R. Goodman, G. McKhann, R. Emerson and C. Schroeder (2011). Tuning of the Human Neocortex to the Temporal Dynamics of Attended Events. J. Neurosci 31(9):3176-85.
• P. Lakatos, G. Karmos, A. Mehta, I. Ulbert, C. Schroeder (2008). Entrainment of Neuronal Oscillations as a Mechanism of Attentional Selection. Science 321:110-113.

11 February 2014: Dave Bulkin

• Y. Saalmann, M. Pinsk, L. Wang, X. Li and S. Kastner (2012). The Pulvinar Regulates Information Transmission Between Cortical Areas Based on Attention Demands. Science 337:753-6.

Additional references:

• Re Granger causality: Bressler SL, Seth AK (2011) Wiener-Granger causality: a well-established methodology. NeuroImage 58:323-329.
• Re the thalamus being more than a relay: Sherman SM (2007) The thalamus is more than just a relay. Curr Opin Neurobiol 17(4):417-422.
• Rachel's book: Sherman SM, Guillery RW (2013). Functional connections of cortical areas: a new view from the thalamus. MIT Press.

18 February 2014: FEBRUARY BREAK

• No meeting

25 February 2014: TBD

• TBD

4 March 2014: Phil Perrone

• C. Asplund1, J. Todd, A. Snyder and R. Marois (2010). A central role for the lateral prefrontal cortex in goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention. Nature Neuroscience,13(4):507-512.

11 March 2014: TBD

• Thom might be out of town

18 March 2014: David Smith

• K. Miura, Z. Mainen and N. Uchida1 (2012). Odor Representations in Olfactory Cortex: Distributed Rate Coding and Decorrelated Population Activity. Neuron 74:1087-1098.

25 March 2014: Khena Swallow

• J. Arsenault, K. Nelissen, B. Jarraya and W. Vanduffel (2013). Dopaminergic Reward Signals Selectively Decrease fMRI Activity in Primate Visual Cortex. Neuron 77:1174-1186.

1 April 2014: SPRING BREAK

• No meeting

8 April 2014: Lindsey Vedder

• M. Schoenfeld, J. Hopf, C. Merkel1, H. Heinze & S. Hillyard. (2014). Object-based attention involves the sequential activation of feature-specific cortical modules. Nature Neuroscience 17(4): 619-626.

15 April 2014: Adam Miller

• Harel A, Kravitz DJ, Baker OI (2014). Task context impacts visual object processing differentially across the cortex. PNAS.

22 April 2014: Cory Horowitz

• Paulk AC, Stacey JA, Pearson TWJ, Taylor GJ, Moore RJD, Srinivasan MV, van Swinderen B (2014). Selective attention in the honeybee optic lobes precedes behavioral choices. PNAS 111(13):5006-5011.

29 April 2014:

• TBD

6 May 2014: Rachel Swanson

• M. Chalk, J. Herrero, M. Gieselmann, L. Delicato, S. Gotthardt and A. Thiele (2010). Attention Reduces Stimulus-Driven Gamma Frequency Oscillations and Spike Field Coherence in V1. Neuron 66, 114--125.