ZeroNoise Lab
Havenith & Schölvinck Lab

Research Topics at ZeroNoise Lab at ESI

Humans may not be good at multitasking – but their brains are! At any given moment, a neuronal population may be involved in multiple cognitive processes, such as representing the physical properties of objects in the environment, adjusting for fluctuating attention levels, and implementing the physiological long-term changes that underlie learning. 

Previous research has overwhelmingly focused on studying how each of these cognitive processes affects neuronal activity in isolation. In contrast, the researchers at the ZeroNoise Lab want to find out how neuronal activity represents complementary cognitive processes simultaneously at any given moment. What’s more, the Lab aims to investigate if the solutions to this fundamental challenge of brain computation are evolutionarily preserved, or if they vary across species.

To study these questions, the researchers at the ZeroNoise Lab conduct parallel experiments in the two most dominant model species of neuroscience – monkeys and mice. Specifically, they use naturalistic foraging tasks in a virtual environment to examine visually guided decision-making in both species. Simultaneously, we record the activity of large neuronal populations in visual cortical areas that are preserved across mammals. This approach uniquely allows them to obtain moment-by-moment readouts of the multi-faceted behaviour of animals, which the researchers then relate to various aspects of ongoing brain activity using cutting-edge computational tools. In this way, the ZeroNoise Lab aims to for the first time explain how the neuronal representations of universal processes like learning and attention jointly unfold in the brain in real time.