A Novel Monkey Kiosk: Cognitive Enrichment and Cognitive Assessment

We now published the hardware and software design for a novel Monkey Kiosk Station that provides cognitive enrichment and the ability to assess cognition with cage-based touchscreen tasks. The paper and its appendix with the technical details are available here.

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First Neuropharmacological Contribution

Congratulations to Ali and Mariann for the first neuropharmacological contribution from our laboratory with the article A computational psychiatry approach identifies how alpha-2A noradrenergic agonist Guanfacine affects feature-based reinforcement learning in the macaque . This study first surveys all 14 different tasks that have ever been used with Guanfacine in nonhuman primate studies and than […]

Adaptive Learning needs Attention, Meta-learning and Working Memory

We tested which model mechanisms best explain how six animals learn attention sets and found a common set of most-important behavioral mechanisms that account for learning success.When learning attention sets is easy value based reinforcement learning and working memory are powerful, but when learning problems are more complex learning is more efficient with attention and […]

The phase of firing of fronto-striatal neurons encodes learning variables

Our new paper shows that neurons in the striatum, anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex encode learning variables in the phase of firing. We outline a powerful regression based analysis pipeline that revealed spiking activity of neurons relative to the phase of beta oscillations carries significant learning information during reversal learning. The paper can be downloaded […]