Blog

How does the brain use the presence or absence of reward to influence its decision-making? Recent SWC Seminar speaker Professor Ilana Witten shared her research on the midbrain dopamine system, its role in reinforcement learning, and state-dependent decision-making in the striatum.

In a recent SWC Seminar, Dr Nuria Vendrell Llopis shared her work on neural reinforcement across brain regions and cell-types. In this Q&A, she expands on what motivated her to pursue this line of research, her key findings, and implications of these findings on how we learn.

Professor Loren Frank recently gave a seminar at SWC where he discussed how research from his lab is helping to understand the structure of representations of past, present, and potential future. In this Q&A, he shares more about his research on representations in the hippocampus and their coordination with activity elsewhere in the brain.

In a recent SWC Seminar, Dr Elenora Russo shared her work investigating the coding structures the brain uses when engaged in different tasks. In this Q&A, she delves into how she became interested in researching this topic, the techniques used to understand the hidden regularities in neuronal dynamics, some implications of her findings, and more.

When stepping out onto a quiet street from a noisy restaurant, you may notice a marked change in the level of background noise. Such changes in our acoustic environments happen constantly throughout our daily lives, yet our brains allow us to adapt appropriately. Andrew King, University of Oxford, gave a SWC seminar outlining the neural circuits and strategies that underlie these adaptive processes. In this Q&A, he shares more about the highly dynamic way in which sounds are processed in the brain.

What happens in our brain when we sleep? In a recent SWC Seminar, Dr Julia Harris discussed how inhibiting different populations of neurons in the brain during specific states of sleep led to effects that could shed light on the role of sleep in emotional processing. In this Q&A, she touches on what has already been known about the reasons why we sleep, her key findings, and what her lab will explore in future.

How can we uncover the way we learn and know things? Recent SWC seminar speaker, Professor André Fenton, has spent his career focusing on the deviations from expectations, the noise that can’t be explained. In this Q&A, he shares how this approach has led him to a new paradigm for thinking about cognition.