NCA Group Meeting with Guest Speaker Jakob Voigts (MIT)

Thursday May 13, 2021, 1:15 PM → 2:30 PM America/New_York

SPiNES Seminar: "A Neural Substrate for Context-Dependent Spatial Reasoning in Mouse Retrosplenial Cortex"

 

Jakob Voigts, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow  
Laboratory of Dr. Mark Harnett
MIT, McGovern Institute for Brain Research

 

Hosted by Jason Moore, PhD (Basu Lab)

Thursday, May 13, 2021, 12:00PM, EST

Zoom link; ID: 990 7724 7475; Password: 694508; Add to Calendar

 

Note: Postdocs are invited to join Jakob for a chat following the talk at 1:30pm.

 

Abstract: 

Cognition requires flexibly interpreting ambiguous information depending on context. Association cortex is thought to perform this computation but the relationship between context encoding and sensory processing is not well understood. Here we study how mouse retrosplenial cortex (RSC) and recurred artificial neural networks (ANN) navigate using locally ambiguous landmarks whose identity is only evident through prior context. Individual neurons in RSC and the ANN encoded mixtures of hypothesis, location, and sensory data and were constrained by stable attractor-like dynamics. The ANN navigated by encoding spatial hypotheses as locations in neural activity space from where identical sensory landmark inputs led to correct solutions via stable attractor dynamics and this computation is mirrored in RSC. Our findings indicate that encoding and computation in associative cortical areas are two aspects of the same process in which stimuli and prior contexts are represented by firing rates such that recurrent dynamics can contextually resolve ambiguous sensory data.