Neuroscience Seminar Series

(Veranstaltung auf Englisch)

We are delighted to announce our next neuroscience seminar series talk.

„The hippocampus as a small-world cognitive map“

Itai Cohen, Department of Physics, Cornell University

Abstract

When a mouse perceives a hawk's shadow, it may have only seconds to decide where to run, yet the safest refuge is often neither visible nor nearby. To survive, it must search its cognitive map quickly enough to choose among many possibilities, and accurately enough to avoid dead ends and hazards along the way. This scenario highlights a core design problem: cognitive maps must preserve fine local structure for reliable action, yet remain globally searchable so that distant, useful solutions can be found efficiently in both space and time. In this talk, I will describe how we used a novel geometry-aware autoencoder to model the structure of the cognitive map from longitudinal calcium imaging from thousands of hippocampal CA1 neurons in mice learning a memory-guided navigation task. We discovered that the hippocampal population code achieves both local fidelity and global searchability through a small-world network structure in the space of neural representations. This functional organization, with implications for both neuroscience and artificial intelligence, sheds light on how hippocampal representations may be optimized for a fundamental challenge faced by intelligent systems: efficiently searching through accurate internal models of the world.

About the speaker

Professor Itai Cohen studies the physics of matter in motion. At Cornell, his research has focused on building microscopic robots, controlling the shear thickening behavior of microscopic and nanoscopic particles suspended in a fluid, exploring the mechanics of materials ranging from biological tissues to origami inspired metamaterials, discovering the aerodynamic and neuromuscular mechanisms used by insects during flapping flight, developing new AI tools for decoding large neuronal data sets, and determining how audiences at heavy metal concerts coordinate their movement. Understanding how emergent behaviors arise from the microscopic rules governing these systems remains one of the biggest challenges in Physics.

In-Person:

MPINB Lecture Hall, Ludwig-Erhard-Allee 2, 53175 Bonn

Zoom:

https://mpinb-mpg-de.zoom-x.de/j/63767300567