ESI Systems Neuroscience Conference 2024

Time in the brain: How does the brain encode and use time to make sense of and interact with the world?

Prof. Merchant's laboratory has been investigating the neural underpinnings of interval timing in corticothalamic-basal ganglia circuit for several years. It has adopted a comparative approach between humans and non-human primates to understand the behavioral, structural, and neurophysiological principles behind perceiving, predicting, and driving behavior using single or rhythmically-timing events in a wide variety of paradigms. The lab uses state-of-the-art experimental tools, including multiarea high-density extracellular recordings in behaving monkeys, comparative psychophysics, EEG recordings in humans and macaques, and high resolution structural and tractography magnetic resonance in both species of primates.

The brain, broadly speaking, is for control. 600 million years of evolution has endowed nervous systems with a multitude of mechanisms for achieving that control. In vertebrates, mechanisms in the spinal cord and hindbrain are responsible for more automatized forms of control: reflex circuits, central pattern generators, and circuits for movement primitives. These processes can be selected amongst, modulated, and chained together by the descending influence of brain systems positioned more rostrally that possess a rich capacity to learn from experience. It is these more adaptive systems that Dr. Paton's laboratory is most interested in understanding. And yet, control by these systems appears to be fundamentally both heterarchical, requiring distinct computations performed by specific brain systems, and hierarchical, with each system operating at varying degrees of abstraction in relation to the immediate physical world. In this talk, Dr. Paton will describe how experiments in his laboratory focused on understanding how neural circuits are provided a temporal basis computation have revealed not only fundamental principles underlying temporal processing, but also signatures of how hierarchies of representations can interact to produce robust policies for behavior, and how distinct aspects of behavioral control appear to be handled by different brain systems.

Prof. Ayelet Landau's research focuses on temporality in the brain and in cognition. Her research seeks to shed light on the cognitive and functional consequences of brain-wide neuronal architecture. Previously, she had investigated how brain rhythms shape perceptual and behavioral performance. Her talk at ESI SyNC will survey a line of work investigating temporal decisions and offer new insights on the core mechanisms and models serving time perception.

The Denison Lab studies visual perception, attention, and decision making, with a focus on temporal dynamics. Our research integrates behavioral measurements (psychophysics, eye tracking), neural measurements (fMRI, EEG/MEG), and computational modeling to investigate how perception and attention unfold in time.

Dr. Tadeusz Kononowicz explores internal representations of duration, timing uncertainty, and the relationship between timing and metacognition across species. In recent years, he initiated investigations of the brain's ability to judge its temporal errors in generated time intervals. Dr. Kononowicz employs a range of methodologies in his work, including computational approaches, non-invasive recordings (EEG and MEG), stimulation methods (transcranial current stimulation) in, as well as in-vivo recordings (spike, LFP), and causal methods (pharmacological injection) in rats.

Dr. Valérie Doyère's research is oriented towards understanding the neural networks and the mechanisms underlying the formation and updating of associative memory, with a special focus on the temporal component which controls the anticipatory aspect of behavior and is fundamental for error detection and learning. Using complementary methodologies (behavior, electropysiology, molecular techniques) in rats, she focuses on a large interconnected network formed by the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex and the striatum which may constitute a functional connectome at the service of integrative functions, such as memory and timing.