About
28
Publications
2,729
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
138
Citations
Introduction
PhD student in Neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario working under the supervision of Dr. Julio Martinez-Trujillo and Dr. Lena Palaniyappan. Working on naturalistic neural encoding of working memory in the primate prefrontal cortex as well as the role of NMDA receptors in this process.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7723-883X
Publications
Publications (28)
Recent advances in neural recording technology allow simultaneously recording action potentials from hundreds to thousands of neurons in awake, behaving animals. However, characterizing spike patterns in the resulting data, and linking these patterns to behaviour, remains a challenging task. The lack of a rigorous mathematical language for variable...
Recent advances in neural recording technology allow simultaneously recording action potentials from hundreds to thousands of neurons in awake, behaving animals. However, characterizing spike patterns in the resulting data, and linking these patterns to behaviour, remains a challenging task. The lack of a rigorous mathematical language for variable...
Recordings of cortical neurons isolated from brain slices and dissociated from their networks, display intrinsic spike frequency adaptation (I-SFA) to a constant current input. Interestingly, extracellular recordings in behaving subjects also show extrinsic-SFA (E-SFA) in response to sustained visual stimulation. Because neurons are isolated from b...
Working memory (WM) is the ability to maintain and manipulate information ‘in mind’. The neural codes underlying WM have been a matter of debate. We simultaneously recorded the activity of hundreds of neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex of male macaque monkeys during a visuospatial WM task that required navigation in a virtual 3D environment....
Neurons in the primate lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) flexibly adapt their activity to support a wide range of cognitive tasks. Whether and how the topography of LPFC neural activity changes as a function of task is unclear. In the present study, we address this issue by characterizing the functional topography of LPFC neural activity in awake be...
The brain can maintain and flexibly manipulate complex visuospatial information ‘in mind’, an ability known as working memory. The neural codes underlying this function have been a matter of debate. We simultaneously recorded the activity of hundreds of neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex of monkeys during a visuospatial working memory task th...
Cells selectively activated by a particular view of an environment have been found in the primate hippocampus (HPC). Whether view cells are present in other brain areas, and how view selectivity interacts with other variables such as object features and place remain unclear. Here, we explore these issues by recording the responses of neurons in the...
Primates use perceptual and mnemonic visuospatial representations to perform everyday functions. Neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) have been shown to encode both of these representations during tasks where eye movements are strictly controlled and visual stimuli are reduced in complexity. This raises the question of whether perceptual...
Working memory is the ability to briefly remember and manipulate information after it becomes unavailable to the senses. The mechanisms supporting working memory coding in the primate brain remain controversial. Here we demonstrate that microcircuits in layers 2/3 of the primate lateral prefrontal cortex dynamically represent memory content in a na...
The hippocampus (HPC) and the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) are two cortical areas of the primate brain deemed essential to cognition. Here, we hypothesized that the codes mediating neuronal communication in the HPC and LPFC microcircuits have distinctively evolved to serve plasticity and memory function at different spatiotemporal scales. We us...
Visual perception occurs when a set of physical signals emanating from the environment enter the visual system and the brain interprets such signals as a percept. Visual working memory occurs when the brain produces and maintains a mental representation of a percept while the physical signals corresponding to that percept are not available. Early s...
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic drug, which has more recently emerged as a rapid-acting antidepressant. When acutely administered at subanesthetic doses, ketamine causes cognitive deficits like those observed in patients with schizophrenia, including impaired working memory. Although these effects have been linked to ketamine’s action as an N...
The primate hippocampus (HPC) and lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) are two brain structures deemed essential to long- and short-term memory functions respectively. Here we hypothesize that although both structures may encode similar information about the environment, the neural codes mediating neuronal communication in HPC and LPFC have differentia...
The primate lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) is considered fundamental for temporarily maintaining and manipulating mental representations that serve behavior, a cognitive function known as working memory. Studies in non-human primates have shown that
LPFC lesions impair working memory and that LPFC neuronal activity encodes working memory represen...
Visual neurons in many brain areas show non-linear response profiles as a function of the stimulus shown inside their receptive fields. These can be fit with different non-linear functions to obtain the tuning curve of the neuron for a particular feature. One example is the contrast response function, e.g., increases in the contrast of a stimulus i...
Spatial working memory (WM) allows us to briefly remember and manipulate spatial information. Traditionally, spatial WM is tested in non-human primates using an oculomotor delayed response (ODR) task that requires eye fixation away from the cue to be remembered. Using this task, a myriad of studies has shown that neurons in the primate lateral pref...
Studies in the macaque Lateral Prefrontal Cortex (LPFC) have shown that single neurons encoded spatial working memory (WM) signals. The majority of these studies have used oculomotor delay response (ODR) tasks that do not dissociate remembered locations in different frames of reference (e.g., retina-centered vs space-centered). Here we used a varia...
Background:
Several primate neurophysiology laboratories have adopted acrylic-free, custom-fit cranial implants. These implants are often comprised of titanium or plastic polymers, such as polyether ether ketone (PEEK). Titanium is favored for its mechanical strength and osseointegrative properties whereas PEEK is notable for its lightweight, mach...