Ehud Vinepinsky

Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris | ENS · Institut de Biologie de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure (IBENS)

Humans, dolphins, and elephants are the only known species that vocally label their conspecifics. It remains unclear whether nonhuman primates share this ability. We recorded spontaneous “phee-call” dialogues between pairs of marmoset monkeys. We discovered that marmosets use these calls to vocally label their conspecifics. Moreover, they respond m...

The ability to navigate the world is a critical cognitive skill that most animals use to find food, shelter, and mates. Understanding the neural basis of navigation requires probing how the brain encodes spatial information through the study of the activity of single neurons and neuronal populations. Classically in vertebrates, studies have centere...

Glial cells support the function of neurons. Recent evidence shows that astrocytes are also involved in brain computations. To explore whether and how their excitable nature affects brain computations and motor behaviors, we used two-photon Ca²⁺ imaging of zebrafish larvae expressing GCaMP in both neurons and radial astrocytes (RAs). We found that...

Feeding strategies of an organism depend on the multimodal sensory processing that most efficiently integrates available visual, chemosensory, and/or mechanoreceptive cues as part of their environmental adaptation. The blind cavefish morph of Astyanax mexicanus has developed sensory-dependent behaviors to find food more efficiently than their eyed,...

Navigation is one of the most fundamental cognitive skills for the survival of fish, the largest vertebrate class, and almost all other animal classes. Space encoding in single neurons is a critical component of the neural basis of navigation. To study this fundamental cognitive component in fish, we recorded the activity of neurons in the central...

The ability to navigate the world is a critical cognitive skill that most animals use to find food, shelter, and mates. Understanding the neural basis of navigation requires probing how the brain encodes spatial information through the study of the activity of single neurons and neuronal populations. Classically in vertebrates, studies have centere...

Navigation is one of the most fundamental cognitive skills for the survival of fish, the largest vertebrate class, and almost all other animal classes. A critical component of the neural basis of navigation is the encoding of space in the activity of single neurons. To study this basic cognitive component in fish, we 8 recorded the activity of sing...

During their seasonal migration, birds stage in areas comprising stopover sites of varying quality. Given that migrating birds have a limited information about their environment, they may land at a low‐quality stopover site in which their fuel deposition rate (FDR) is low. Birds landing at such sites should decide either to extend their stopover du...

Like most animals, the survival of fish depends on navigation in space. This capacity has been documented in behavioral studies that have revealed navigation strategies. However, little is known about how freely swimming fish represent space and locomotion in the brain to enable successful navigation. Using a wireless neural recording system, we me...

Navigation by mammals is believed to rely on a network of neurons in the hippocampal formation, which includes the hippocampus, the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), and additional nearby regions. Neurons in these regions represent spatial information by tuning to the position, orientation, and speed of the animal in the form of head direction cells,...

The neural mechanisms governing fish behavior remain mostly unknown, although fish constitute the majority of all vertebrates. The ability to record brain activity from freely moving fish would advance research on the neural basis of fish behavior considerably. Moreover, precise control of the recording location in the brain is critical to studying...

The archerfish, which is unique in its ability to hunt insects above the water level by shooting a jet of water at its prey, operates in a complex visual environment. The fish needs to quickly select one object from among many others. In animals other than the archerfish, long-range inhibition is considered to drive selection. As a result of long-r...

Like most animals, the survival of fish depends crucially on navigation in space. This capacity has been documented in numerous behavioral studies that have revealed navigation strategies and the sensory modalities used for navigation. However, virtually nothing is known about how fish represent space and locomotion in the brain to enable successfu...

Background: Fish are a diverse group of vertebrates with very different brain structures. The study of the neurobiology of fish can thus lead to many important insights on information processing in the brain in a variety of environments. New method: We developed a novel wireless technique to record extracellular neural signal activity in freely...

Direction selective cells have been found in the retina, the first level of the visual system, in mammals and recently also in the archer fish. These cells are involved in a variety of fast neural computation processes, from the control of eye movements to the detection of prey by the archer fish. The standard model for this mechanism in mammalian...