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Recent News
We are part of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley. Our research focuses on understanding the functional organization of the frontal cortex at the single neuron level. Our methods use sophisticated behavioral paradigms, multichannel recording and computational analysis of neuronal data. We aim to understand the neuronal mechanisms underlying a number of high-level cognitive and behavioral processes, including decision-making, learning, and working memory. The goal of our research is to guide the development of the next generation of treatments for mental illness.
February 2025
Thom’s latest paper was just published in Nature Neuroscience. Not only did we show that hippocampus encodes context, while orbitofrontal cortex encodes a context-dependent value, we also showed that the contextual information is transmitted via a phase code, rather than a rate code.
January 2025
Congratulations to Thom, who has started his own lab as an Assistant Professor at U.T. Austin!
September 2024
Alyssa Sanchez joins our lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Alyssa graduated from Martin Usrey’s lab at U.C. Davis where she studied the visual responses of the lateral geniculate nucleus. Welcome to the other end of the brain Alyssa!
Previous news
Apr 2024: New paper in Nature Neuroscience via our collaboration with Steven Kennerley, which showed that neurons encode a distribution of prediction errors in anterior cingulate cortex, consistent with distributional reinforcement learning.
Mar 2024: Dr. Alyssa Sanchez joins our lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Alyssa graduated from Martin Usrey’s lab at U.C. Davis where she studied the visual responses of the lateral geniculate nucleus. Welcome to the other end of the brain Alyssa!
Nov 2023: New paper in the Journal of Neuroscience based on a symposium at SfN comparing cognitive and motor learning.
Oct 2023: New paper in Scientific Reports via our collaboration with Jose Carmena, which examined how motor signals from brain-machine interfaces compare with natural movements.
Aug 2023: New paper from Thom and Zuzanna in Nature Neuroscience describing how value dynamics in orbitofrontal cortex can influence response preparation signals in motor cortex.
Jul 2023: New paper in the Journal of Neuroscience via our collaboration with Erin Rich which showed clear differences in neuronal tuning across the cingulate sulcus.
May 2023: Celia graduated. She has moved on to be a science writer at Wired magazine.
Jan 2023: Joni was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dec 2022: New paper from Thom in the 25th Anniversary of Trends in Cognitive Sciences outlining what the next 25 years may hold for neural decoding
Jul 2022: Eric was awarded an NRSA to study interactions between prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus during model-based learning.
Jun 2022: New paper from Zuzanna published in Neuron which shows that orbitofrontal value flip-flopping biases motor preparation signals in the anterior cingulate cortex.
May 2022: Congratulations to Dr. Zuzanna Balewski on being awarded her PhD.
Apr 2022: Congratulations to Eric on passing his qualifying exam.
Mar 2022: New paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience describing our views on orbitofrontal-hippocampal interactions.
Dec 2021: New paper in Neuron via our collaboration with Feng-Kuei Chiang and Erin Rich showing that when animals use strategies to perform working memory tasks, neural codes shift from single-unit tuning to population-level distributed codes.
Aug 2021: New paper in Cell where we show that hippocampal place cells can also encode locations in an abstract, cognitive space.
Jul 2021: Happy to be part of the team that put together this paper in Neuron on the challenges posed by gender bias in academia.
Jun 2021: Eric Hu has joined the lab. Eric is a first year HWNI graduate student. He will be studying how the hippocampus encodes a cognitive map. Welcome to the lab Eric!
Jan 2021: Dr. Thomas Elston has joined the lab as a postdoctoral researcher. Thom receieved his training from Dr. Andreas Nieder. Welcome to the lab Thom!