About
27
Publications
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777
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Additional affiliations
April 2021 - present
May 2014 - November 2014
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Position
- Research Associate
December 2013 - March 2021
Education
October 2009 - November 2013
April 2003 - July 2009
Publications
Publications (27)
Hemispheric asymmetries differ considerably across species, but the neurophysiological base of this variation is unclear. It has been suggested that hemispheric asymmetries evolved to bypass interhemispheric conduction delay when performing time critical tasks. This implies that large brains should be more asymmetric. We performed preregistered cro...
Brains are among the most energetically costly tissues in the mammalian body.¹ This is predominantly caused by expensive neurons with high glucose demands.² Across mammals, the neuronal energy budget appears to be fixed, possibly posing an evolutionary constraint on brain growth.3, 4, 5, 6 Compared to similarly sized mammals, birds have higher numb...
Corvids possess cognitive skills, matching those of non-human primates. However, how these species with their small brains achieve such feats remains elusive. Recent studies suggest that cognitive capabilities could be based on the total numbers of telencephalic neurons. Here we extend this hypothesis further and posit that especially high neuron c...
Animal-fMRI is a powerful method to understand neural mechanisms of cognition, but it remains a major challenge to scan actively participating small animals under low-stress conditions. Here, we present an event-related functional MRI platform in awake pigeons using single-shot RARE fMRI to investigate the neural fundaments for visually-guided deci...
Comparative studies on brain asymmetry date back to the 19th century but then largely disappeared due to the assumption that lateralization is uniquely human. Since the reemergence of this field in the 1970s, we learned that left-right differences of brain and behavior exist throughout the animal kingdom and pay off in terms of sensory, cognitive,...
The phylogenetic position of crocodilians in relation to birds and mammals makes them an interesting animal model for investigating the evolution of the nervous system in amniote vertebrates. A few neuroanatomical atlases are available for reptiles, but with a growing interest in these animals within the comparative neurosciences, a need for these...
Despite the long, separate evolutionary history of birds and mammals, both lineages developed a rich behavioral repertoire of remarkably similar executive control generated by distinctly different brains. The seat for executive functioning in birds is the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) and the mammalian equivalent is known as the prefrontal cortex...
Reptiles and birds are a fascinating group of animals that is most critical to understanding the evolution of vertebrate brains. Birds are the only class of vertebrates that can rival mammals with respect to their cognitive abilities. And they do so with brains that are vastly different from ours. This chapter reviews what we know about reptilian a...
The ability to speak is a unique human capacity, but where is it located in our brains? This question is closely connected to the pioneering work of Pierre Paul Broca in the 1860s. Based on post-mortem observations of aphasic patients' brains, Broca located language production in the 3rd convolution of the left frontal lobe and thus reinitiated the...
Crocodilians are important for understanding the evolutionary history of amniote neural systems as they are the nearest extant relatives of modern birds and share a stem amniote ancestor with mammals. Although the crocodilian brain has been investigated anatomically, functional studies are rare. Here, we employed functional magnetic resonance imagi...
It is still debated whether limb-use preferences represent a common trait in vertebrates, which is based on a shared phylogenetic history. Unravelling the evolutionary origin and pattern of paw preferences in vertebrates requires the analysis of a larger number of species within an ecologically relevant setting. We therefore investigated whether ob...
In the last two decades, the avian hippocampus has been repeatedly studied with respect to its architecture, neurochemistry, and connectivity pattern. We review these insights and conclude that we unfortunately still lack proper knowledge on the interaction between the different hippocampal subregions. To fill this gap, we need information on the f...
Apes, corvids, and pigeons differ in their pallial/cortical neuron numbers, with apes ranking first and pigeons third. Do cognitive performances rank accordingly? If they would do, cognitive performance could be explained at a mechanistic level by computational capacity provided by neuron numbers. We discuss five areas of cognition (short-term memo...
Purpose:
Establishment of regional longitudinal (T1 ) and transverse (T2 ) relaxation times in awake pigeons and rats at 7T field strength. Regional differences in relaxation times between species and between two different pigeon breeds (homing pigeons and Figurita pigeons) were investigated.
Methods:
T1 and T2 relaxation times were determined f...
Since the 1970s, a multitude of studies has proven that brain asymmetries are not unique to humans, but a common feature in vertebrate and even in invertebrate species. While the majority of these studies have focused mainly on the behavioral aspect of these asymmetries, an increasing number of studies have also investigated the underlying brain st...
Reptiles and birds are a fascinating group of animals that is most critical to understanding the evolution of vertebrate brains. Birds are the only class of vertebrates that can rival mammals with respect to their cognitive abilities. And they do so with brains that are vastly different from ours. This chapter reviews what we know about reptilian a...
Several studies analyzing the ontogenetic origin of cerebral lateralization provide evidences for a genetic foundation of handedness in humans that is modulated by environmental influences. Since other forms of behavioral lateralization are less investigated, it is unclear as to how far different functions display similar heritability. But deeper k...
Birds show remarkable visual abilities that surpass most of our visual psychophysiological abilities. In this study, we investigated visual associative areas of the tectofugal visual system in pigeons. Similar to the condition in mammals, ascending visual pathways in birds are subdivided into parallel form/color vs. motion streams at the thalamic a...
The visual system of adult pigeons shows a lateralization of object discrimination with a left hemispheric dominance at the behavioral, physiological, and anatomical level. The crucial trigger for the establishment of this asymmetry is the position of the embryo inside the egg which exposes the right eye to light falling through the egg shell. As a...
When we look at our hands, outwardly they look remarkably similar to each other—and the bones, muscles and nerves within the two hands are equally symmetric. Way before the advent of modern neuroimaging, this fact led researchers to the conclusion that the striking preference most people show in using one hand over the other to conduct fine motor t...
The avian hippocampal formation (HF) and mammalian hippocampus share a similar functional role in spatial cognition, but the underlying neuronal mechanisms enabling the functional similarity are incompletely understood. To better understand the organization of the avian HF and its transmitter receptors, we analyzed binding site densities for glutam...
Vertebrate brains display physiological and anatomical left-right differences, which are related to hemispheric dominances for specific functions. Functional lateralizations likely rely on structural left-right differences in intra- and interhemispheric connectivity patterns that develop in tight gene-environment interactions. The visual systems of...
There is considerable debate about whether population-level asymmetries in limb preferences are uniquely human or are a common feature among vertebrates. In the present article the results of studies investigating limb preferences in all non-extinct vertebrate orders are systematically analysed by employing cladographic comparisons. These studies a...
The lateralized visual systems of pigeons and chickens are excellent models to study neural asymmetries at the functional and anatomical level. The aim of the current study was to reveal why these two species closely resemble each other with respect to left-right differences in behavior but not with respect to the pathways involved: While pigeons s...
Lateralisation of conspecific vocalisation has been observed in several vertebrate species. In the present article we review the results of behavioural and neuroanatomical studies investigating this feature. By employing cladographic comparisons we identify those vertebrate orders in which evidence for or against lateralisation of production and pe...
Projects
Projects (5)
The 5-day summer school (August 15 to August 19 2022, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey) is aimed towards master students/ PhD students with a neuroscience background interested in comparative neuroscience and evolution. Among other things, the summer school comprises talks by leading experts in the field, the opportunity to present own ongoing or planned research in quick five min talks, and individual discussion sessions with experienced research for the sake of career planning. Joining the workshop is free of charge. Interested students can apply under by contacting Ms. Tutku Öztel (toztel17@ku.edu.tr) sending their CV and a 300-word abstract describing their current or planned research they would like to present at the summer school. Deadline for submissions is July 15th 2022, but can be extended.
We investigate if dogs' behavior in the inequity aversion task can be explained by social disappointment in the human experimenter rather than by inequity aversion or food expectation.
(I) establish a comprehensive fMRI protocol for cold-blooded, reptilian species, (II) use this protocol to investigate the functional organization of their visual and auditory system and based on the acquired data.
