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Spring Semester 2014-2015

For Fall Semester 2015-2016, 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.

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The Fall 2015 semester's theme is  “Learning within constraints”.  This is intentionally broad, in part because BCS itself has broadened this semester to include behavioral ecology approaches.  Here are some examples of what we have in mind:

  • Learning is constrained, and therefore shaped in form and content, by preexisting memory.  How so?
  • Learning is constrained by species-specific capacities and attunements, sensory or otherwise.  When is this important? 
  • Learning is constrained by modality:  how is learning about space different from, or similar to, learning about nonspatial stimuli?  How is space encoded; how is this similar to and different from other types of information encoding?  This could be a proxy for hippocampus = place codes vs hippocampus = episodic memory wars. 
  • Learning is strongly shaped by ‘educated guesses’ of whether a new stimulus is ‘the same’ as a previous stimulus or not:  the former is based on generalization and leads to the reinforcement learning literature; the latter instead leads one into literatures of competition and interference among conflicting but similar memories.  What do we know about this ongoing process, and is there something to be gained by combining and comparing the reinforcement learning literature with the interference literature?  This essentially statistical process is also the basis for mimicry and its advantages, especially regarding imperfect mimics.  

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.

Presenting your own work is always welcome, in whatever manner you like.

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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25 August 2015:  Organizational Meeting

  • Barron et al., 2015.  Embracing multiple definitions of learning.  Trends in Neurosciences 38(7):405.
    • This short TINS paper reflects on different views of learning derived from different fields of study (neuroscience, psychology, behavioral ecology, machine learning).  

1 September 2015:  No meeting.

8 September 2015:  Adam Miller

15 September 2015:  David Smith

  • Akers et al (2014). Hippocampal Neurogenesis Regulates Forgetting During Adulthood and Infancy.Science, 344:598-602.

Optional reading: This review article has some background material on neurognesis as it relates to the main paper.

22 September 2015:  TBD

  • TBD

29 September 2015:  Marissa Rice

  • Thom out of town

6 October 2015:  Norma Hernandez

  • TBD

13 October 2015:  Fall Break - no BCS

20 October 2015:  Society for Neuroscience meeting - no BCS

27 October 2015:  Aubrey Kelly

  • TBD

10 November 2015: Khena Swallow

  • TBD

17 November 2015:  Alex Ophir

  • TBD

24 November 2015:  Lisa Hiura

  • Khena out of town, possibly also Alex

1 December 2015:  TBD

  • Khena out of town

 

 

 

 

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