The Dutch Senate has ordered the Biomedical Primate Research Centre in the Netherlands to shift its funding away from primate experiments by 2030.

Anatomical studies have revealed a prominent role for feedback projections in the primate visual cortex. Theoretical models suggest that these projections support important brain functions such as att...

The before and after journey of a family using tech to battle ALS

The primate dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) displays unique in vivo activity patterns, but how in vivo activity regulates DLPFC pyramidal neuron (PN) properties remains unclear. We assessed the effects of in vivo Kir2.1 overexpression, a genetic silencing tool, on synapses in monkey DLPFC PNs. We show for the first time that recombinant ion channel expression successfully modifies the excitability of primate cortex neurons, producing effects on synaptic properties apparently different from those in the rodent cortex.

Visually guided grasping is a fundamental building block of animal behavior, the specific neural mechanisms of which remain poorly documented in th...

Select a state on the map to see the impact of NIH funding across America.

Inspired by the human visual system, a vision chip with primitive-based complementary pathways is developed to overcome the power and bandwidth wall of vision systems, achieving fast, precise, robust&...

Scientific Reports - Coordinating multiple mental faculties during learning

The brain represents the world through the activity of neural populations; however, whether the computational goal of sensory coding is to support discrimination of sensory stimuli or to generate an internal model of the sensory world is unclear. Correlated variability across a neural population (noise correlations) is commonly observed experimentally, and many studies demonstrate that correlated variability improves discriminative sensory coding compared to a null model with no correlations. However, such results do not address whether correlated variability is optimal for discriminative sensory coding. If the computational goal of sensory coding is discriminative, than correlated variability should be optimized to support that goal. We assessed optimality of noise correlations for discriminative sensory coding in diverse datasets by developing two novel null models, each with a biological interpretation. Across datasets, we found that correlated variability in neural populations leads to highly suboptimal discriminative sensory coding according to both null models. Furthermore, biological constraints prevent many subsets of the neural populations from achieving optimality, and subselecting based on biological criteria leaves red discriminative coding performance suboptimal. Finally, we show that optimal subpopulations are exponentially small as the population size grows. Together, these results demonstrate that the geometry of correlated variability leads to highly suboptimal discriminative sensory coding. NEW & NOTEWORTHY The brain represents the world through the activity of neural populations that exhibit correlated variability. We assessed optimality of correlated variability for discriminative sensory coding in diverse datasets by developing two novel null models. Across datasets, correlated variability in neural populations leads to highly suboptimal discriminative sensory coding according to both null models. Biological constraints prevent the neural populations from achieving optimality. Together, these results demonstrate that the geometry of correlated variability leads to highly suboptimal discriminative sensory coding.

Children who learn maths working in markets and children who learn maths only from school were both unable to transfer their skills to new contexts, highlighting a need to reconsider how maths is taught in school.

Jacqueline Gottlieb made a bold and quite tantalizing statement six years ago. “Curiosity is going to take neuroscience to the next frontier.” Today we check in on that assertion. We talked about visu...