Talk Title: TBD

Eric Yttri, PhD

Associate Professor, Biological Sciences and Neuroscience Institute
Carnegie Mellon University

The selection of actions is central to how we interact with the world, a reality that is often not fully appreciated until this ability is lost through impairments like stroke and Parkinson’s disease. Our goal is to establish how neural circuits lead to these action selection decisions. The vital ability to make appropriate actions requires the coordination of motor, reward, and cognitive brain systems. While compelling research has been accomplished in individual brain areas, studying elements of neuronal circuits in isolation yields an incomplete and potentially misleading picture. Our research approach is inclusive yet specific: interrogating the functional interactions between areas in a manner more typical of cognitive neuroscience, while also identifying the computational contributions of individual cell types within each region. To establish the neural correlates of behavior, we monitor the electrical activity of hundreds of individual neurons simultaneously. This feat is made possible using technology we helped design that records from an order of magnitude more neurons than the current state of the art permits.  We have also developed unique computational methods to distill and analyze these data in new and meaningful ways.