Our new paper shows how fast spiking interneurons in the striatum activate specifically when attention cues are learned. This is a rare paper where we succeed to isolate fast spiking interneurons in recordings from nonhuman primate anterior striatum while the animals performed a complex feature-based attentional learning task. Phd can. Kia Banaeie Boroujeni spearheaded the advanced analysis pipeline for this sophisticated paper – congratulations for a huge milestone in deciphering the sources of attentional control! The paper can be downloaded here. See also Research-News @ Vanderbilt covering these findings.
The 2015 BrainDay at Waterloo University hosted Thilo for a lecture for the neuroscience section. Brainday is a highly inspiring event organized by the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at Waterloo and the University to discuss brain topic from four different fields in a unifying daylong setting (Psychology, Philosophy, Systems Neuroscience, Theoretical Neuroscience). The talk at […]
Acetylcholinergic Drug enhances attention at different dose as cognitive flexibilityWe tested how a cholinergic drug that is used to treat symptoms of dementia (donepezil, Arizept) affects cognitive abilities across multiple domains in monkeys. We found that donepezil showed stunning improvements of attentional filtering (less distraction) during visual search but at a different dose at it […]
The lab has a new publication showcasing and describing details of Quaddles: A multidimensional 3D object set with parametrically-controlled and customizable features. Quaddles have 5+ feature dimensions, each with multiple possible feature values that can be parametrically morphed, making it possible to generate a near arbitrary number of unique objects. Thanks to Marcus and Milad […]