During our festive Christmas celebration, we reflected on an exciting year of scientific discoveries. The evening was filled with punch, nice food, stories, and papersongs. Live music was, of course, a must-have addition to the party.
The Optophysiology Lab wishes you a Merry Christmas and a good start to the year 2025.
Eliza Vylekzhanina has been awarded one of the 20 GNS Travel Grants, valued at €300, to support her attendance at the Göttingen Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society.
Ensuring proper pain relief in laboratory animals is vital for their welfare and for obtaining accurate scientific results. We retrospectively examined the effects of carprofen as post-operative analgesia in Sprague Dawley rats following stereotactic surgery.
In this study, we employed an action-preparation task in rats, combined with bidirectional optogenetic interventions, opto-fMRI, single unit electrophysiology and local field potential synchrony measurements across PFC subsections. Our findings support a clear and simple model of action inhibition within the prefrontal network.
In this paper we propose the novel class of hierarchical inverse Q-learning (HIQL) algorithms, which extend the fixed-reward inverse Q-learning (IQL) framework from Kalweit et al. (2020) to solve multiintention IRL problems. We applied HIQL in a real mice decision-making dataset from a dynamic two-armed bandit task (De La Crompe et al., 2023), and mathematically characterized exploitation and exploration behavior of animals during value-based decision-making.
We have an opening for a highly motivated PhD student to help us investigate the mechanisms of movement disorders, epilepsy, motor planning, reward expectation, attention, and action selection. Specifically, we investigate inhibitory control of the motor system by the thalamic reticular nucleus.
How do brains—biological or artificial—respond and adapt to an ever-changing environment? In a recent meeting, experts from various fields of neuroscience and artificial intelligence met to discuss internal world models in brains and machines, arguing for an interdisciplinary approach to gain deeper insights into the underlying mechanisms.
Dear Brice, it was a pleasure working with you. Thank you for your time and dedication while you worked in our team. All the best for your next step.
“Brice, Brice, au revoir”
Clownfish can apparently count – this is the conclusion drawn by Japanese researchers from an experiment they conducted on the territorial behavior of the animals. Is this really true? “The researchers are jumping to conclusions,” says Prof. Dr. Ilka Diester.
Joschka Boedecker, Ilka Diester and Monika Schoenauer about internal world models in people, animals and AI
In this study, we introduce the architecture, the integrated building blocks, and the post-CMOS processes required to realize a NeuroBus , and we characterize the prototyped direct digitizing neural recorder front-end as well as polyimide-based ECoG brain interface.
In this study, we introduce a novel class of Latent (Markov) Variable Inverse Q-learning algorithms for characterizing animal behavior during complex decision-making tasks.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the Optophysiology and Robot Learning Lab.
The BrainWorlds Freiburg-Oxford Workshop on November 8-9th, 2023 – an event of great scientific value for the BrainWorlds Research initiative and the partnership between Freiburg and Oxford Universities.
We have an opening for a highly motivated PhD student to help us investigate the mechanisms of inhibitory control of the motor system by the thalamic reticular nucleus. You will help further our understanding of movement disorders, epilepsy, motor planning, reward expectation, attention, and action selection.
Event Dates: November 8-9, 2023
Event Location: Nexus Lab, IMBIT, Freiburg Germany
Are you ready to embark on a thrilling journey into the intricate world of neuroscience? Do you possess a relentless curiosity, thrive in collaborative environments, and have the motivation to tackle complex challenges in experimental and computational neuroscience?
To study behavioral flexibility in freely-moving mice, we developed a versatile, low-cost, open-source behavioral setup, called FreiBox, allowing us to investigate the neuronal correlates of licking-based behavioral flexibility.
This study proposes an unitary concept that, leveraging a cross-species definition of prefrontal regions, explains how prefrontal ensembles adaptively regulate and efficiently coordinate multiple processes in distinct cognitive behaviors.
This study provides mechanistic insights into the interactions between the rostral forelimb area (RFA) and the caudal forelimb area (CFA). Specifically, we provide evidence for a differential impact of RFA on CFA depending on the task phase and the targeted CFA layers.