We want to understand how animals infer and use internal models to produce adaptive, flexible behavior in dynamic, uncertain settings.
Head of Mechanistic Cognitive Neuroscience
What is Mechanistic Cognitive Neuroscience: Q&A with Vivek Jayaraman »
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Summary
We aim to discover the circuit dynamics, network architectures, neuronal biophysics, synaptic rules, and molecular pathways that make cognition possible.
We are quantitative experimentalists, theorists, and tool-builders, all working together to break through technical, conceptual, and computational barriers that make cognitive computations challenging to understand.
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News
NEWS
05/11/20 | We are excited to welcome Carsen Stringer as a Group Leader in MCN. Learn more about the Stringer lab.
AWARD
07/22/19 | Misha Ahrens Awarded Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize: Group Leader Misha Ahrens has been awarded the Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize for 2019 by the Hertie Foundation and the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies.
NEWS
06/20/19 | Frustrated Fish Give Up Thanks to Glia, Not Just Neurons: Giving up when efforts are futile depends on glial cells called radial astrocytes, highlighting a novel computational role for the underappreciated brain cells.
News
02/07/19 | How Larval Fly Brains Deal with Windy Situations: Researchers are uncovering the neural mechanisms behind Drosophila larval navigation in wind.
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Meet Vivek Jayaraman
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Our Work
Creating new behavioral paradigms
Our researchers are developing ways to elicit, perturb, measure, and interpret complex and rapidly adapting behaviors, both in the lab and in enriched, ethological settings. This visualization from the Dudman lab shows the trajectories of a mouse learning to run to two remembered locations to trigger release of a reward. Paths to the different locations are depicted in white and blue.
Pioneering new techniques
Janelia labs collaborate across disciplines to pioneer new techniques to probe mechanisms of cognition. The Ahrens Lab used whole-brain imaging to monitor the activity of neurons and glia separately in behaving zebrafish, sorting out the relative contribution of each cell type to a specific behavior – giving up in the face of futile actions.
Building upon Janelia’s strengths
Our labs benefit from the ongoing, foundational work at Janelia on neural circuits. Shown here are Drosophila ellipsoid body “compass neurons” segmented in an electron microscopy reconstruction from the Hess Lab and FlyEM team (left) and genetically labeled in a light microscopy image from the Rubin Lab and FlyLight team (right).
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Open Positions
Group Leaders
We are currently not accepting applications for a Group Leader position. Please check back in the Spring of 2021 for more information regarding Group Leader application information.
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“How the brain enables cognition is one of the biggest questions in neuroscience. To tackle it, we’re doing everything from designing new imaging techniques to creating novel paradigms to study flexible behavior.”
-Vivek Jayaraman
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Conferences and Workshops
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