Integrated Calendar

Learning lays the foundation for motivated behavior, enabling us to recognize and respond appropriately to salient events. However, to function adaptively in a dynamic environment, we must be able to flexibly alter learned behavioral responses in accordance with our ongoing experience. In this talk, I will present studies examining at the cognitive, neural, and computational levels how the learning processes that support adaptive behavioral flexibility change over the course of development from childhood to adulthood. I will show that development confers marked changes in the cognitive representations engaged during learning and I will propose that learning about the degree of instrumental agency afforded by the environment may be a critical factor that shapes an individual’s behavioral repertoire.

Sexually reproducing animals display sex-specific behaviors wired onto dimorphic connectivity patterns in the nervous system. The mechanisms underlying the development of sexually dimorphic nervous systems that consists mainly of shared neuronal types remain largely unknown. Within the nervous system, males and females display a number of anatomical sexual dimorphisms often in the form of neurons that are present exclusively in one, but not the other sex. In this talk I will focus on sex-specific wiring of neurons that are present in both sexes, and demonstrate the sex-specific functions of sex-shared neurons in C. elegans. The key finding that I will present is that sex-specific wiring patterns are the result of sex-specific synaptic pruning events. I will show that many neurons initially form synapses in a non-discriminatory manner in both the male and hermaphrodite pattern before sexual maturation, but sex-specific pruning events result in the sex-specific maintenance of subsets of the connections. I will describe the behavioral tests taken to show that rewiring is indicative of repurposing of the function of sensory and interneuron. I will present the conserved genes I uncovered that function to determine sex-specific connectivity patterns. To summarize I will discuss how the sexual identity of individual neurons, by initiating selective synapse loss, refines the circuitry and defines sex-specific synaptic targets. This allows for diversification of behavioral outputs with a limited set of shared neurons.