Integrated Calendar

Grid cell responses develop gradually after eye opening, but little is known about the rules that govern the process. In the first part of the talk, I will present a biologically plausible model for the experience-dependent formation of a grid cell network, one that, among other things, leads to a mature network that can path-integrate velocity inputs, and recapitulates the abrupt transition to stable patterned responses as seen in experiment. The phenomenology of grid cell population activity has rapidly advanced, but, with disparate competing possibilities, the circuit mechanisms underlying grid cell activity remain almost entirely unresolved. In the second part of the talk, I will propose a strategy that combines existing experimental techniques in a way that promises to bring the mechanistic underpinnings of grid cells in sharper focus. The strategy is based on the theoretical insight that small global perturbations of circuit activity will result in characteristic quantal shifts in the spatial tuning relationships between cells, which should be observable from multi- single unit recordings of a small subsample of the population. I will show how this technique allows the experimenter to discriminate between conceptually distinct mechanisms that are currently undifferentiated by experiment.

How animals make decisions in the wild is an open key-question in biology. Our lack of knowledge on this fundamental question results from a technological gap – the difficulty to track animals over long periods while monitoring their behavior; and from a conceptual gap – how to identify animals’ decision-points outdoors? We apply innovative on-board miniature sensors, to study decision making in wild bats, focusing on one of the most fundamental contexts of decision making – foraging for food. We are interested in how different sources of information, e.g., social information and sensory information, are integrated when making foraging decisions.