The overarching interest of the Bear lab is in the question of how experience and deprivation modify synaptic connections in the brain. Experience-dependent synaptic plasticity is the physical substrate of memory, sculpts connections during postnatal development to determine the capabilities and limitations of brain functions, is responsible for the reorganization of the brain after damage, and is vulnerable in numerous psychiatric and neurological diseases and contributes to their symptoms.

One of the central questions in the field of motor control is to understand how our motor goals are translated into actions. The Bizzi laboratory has elaborated a theoretical and experimental framework that describes the way in which the central nervous system transforms planned movements into muscle activations. Among the techniques used by the lab are behavioral training, cortical recording from single neurons, electromyographic (EMG) recording of muscle activity, microstimulation, cellular inactivation, kinematic measurement of movements in three dimensions, functional imaging, and computational modeling. Experimental models currently include frogs (including spinalized and spinal cord-isolated preparations), rats, cats, rhesus monkeys, and humans (both patients and normal subjects). The Bizzi lab is affiliated with the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

A primary focus of the research in the Brown laboratory is the development of statistical methods and signal-processing algorithms for neuroscience data analysis, using combinations of likelihood, Bayesian, state-space, time-series and point process approaches. The laboratory is also using a systems neuroscience approach to study how the state of general anesthesia is induced and maintained. The long-term goal of this research is to establish a neurophysiological definition of anesthesia, safer, site-specific anesthetic drugs and to develop better neurophysiologically-based methods for measuring depth of anesthesia.

The Chung laboratory is an interdisciplinary research team devoted to developing and applying novel technologies (e.g. CLARITY) for integrative and comprehensive understanding of large-scale complex biological systems.

The Desimone lab's research focuses on the neural bases of attention and executive control, which are frequently abnormal in major mental diseases. His lab combines neurophysiological recording in animals and fMRI and MEG brain imaging techniques in humans to understand how neural circuits filter out distracting information. His lab is particularly interested in the role of synchronized neural activity in attentional control.

The Fee lab studies how the brain learns and generates complex sequential behaviors, with a focus on the songbird as a model system. Birdsong is a complex behavior that young birds learn from their fathers and it provides an ideal system to study the neural basis of learned behavior. Because the parts of the bird's brain that control song learning are closely related to human circuits that are disrupted in brain disorders such as Parkinson's and Huntington's disease, Fee hopes the lessons learned from birdsong will provide new clues to the causes and possible treatment of these conditions.

The goal of the Gabrieli lab is to understand principles of brain organization that are consistent across individuals and those that vary across people due to age, personality, and other dimensions of individuality. Therefore, we examine brain-behavior relations across the life span, from children through the elderly. Our primary methods are brain imaging (functional and structural), and the experimental behavioral study of patients with brain injuries. The majority of our studies involve functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but we also employ other brain measures as needed to address scientific questions, including electroencephalography (EEG).

The same brain that can construct language, music and mathematics also lets us develop habits of thought and action. These semi-automatic routines free us to think and attend to the world. But the habit system can also be hijacked by disease and drug exposure. The Graybiel Laboratory focuses on the habit system of the brain and our remarkable ability to switch from conscious activity to nearly non-conscious behavior. The goal of this research is to understand how we make and break habits and how the neurobiology of the habit system is helping to advance understanding of human problems ranging from Parkinson’s disease to obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders and addiction.

The Harnett laboratory studies how the biophysical features of neurons, including ion channels, receptors, and membrane electrical properties, endow neural circuits with powerful processing capabilities, ultimately allowing them to perform the complex computations required to drive adaptive behavior.

The contribution of the oculomotor system to the acquisition and maintenance of visually guided behavior is being examined in cats. Surgical immobilization of an eye in dark-reared kittens precludes development of guidance when the paralyzed eye is provided exposure in light. Light-reared animals retain visual guidance following eye immobilization surgery. Similarly, when proprioception from ocular musculature is surgically interrupted in dark-reared kittens, they fail to acquire visually guided behaviors when later exposed in light. The findings imply that both visually elicited eye movements and proprioception from the extraocular muscles are essential to acquisition of visually guided behaviors, while their role is reduced following this development.

Hogan's research in the Newman Laboratory emphasizes forceful interaction between the motor control systems of humans and machines (i.e., robots). Recent work pioneered therapeutic neurobotics to promote recovery after brain injury. It provides durable benefits even for chronic-phase stroke survivors, suggesting that with appropriate stimulation neural plasticity may be harnessed even long after injury. Devices to address balance, gait and abnormal lower-limb motor synergies, both in animals and humans, are in development or beginning trials.

A new generation of brain scanning methods will combine the specificity of cellular neuroimaging with the noninvasiveness and coverage of functional magnetic resonance imaging. The Jasanoff Laboratory is developing molecular strategies to help achieve this. We work on the chemistry and biochemistry of novel neuroimaging agents, and our overall goal is to apply the new agents for high-resolution analyses of the neural mechanisms of simple behavior in animals.

The Kanwisher lab investigates the functional organization of the brain as a window into the architecture of the human mind. In the past, our lab has discovered a number of cortical regions that are stunningly specialized for specific cognitive tasks such as the perception of faces, places, bodies, and words. Current work is attempting to better characterize the function of each of these regions, to test long-standing but unresolved claims of other cortical specializations (e.g., for language), and to search for new unpredicted specializations using novel clustering methods (in collaboration with Polina Golland). More generally, we want to know which mental functions get their own specialized piece of cortical territory and why we have cortical regions specialized for some mental functions, but apparently not others.

How are transient sensory experiences captured and stored in the brain? The main focus of the Lin lab is to explore the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which experience is coupled to modifications of neural circuits that lead to long term behavioural changes.

Operating at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and engineering, the McDermott lab’s long term goals include understanding the computational principles underlying human hearing, improving devices for assisting those whose hearing is impaired and designing more effective machine systems for recognizing and interpreting sound.

The capacity of the brain to modify connections in response to levels of activity is termed plasticity. Plasticity is a prominent feature of brain development, and in the adult underlies learning and memory and adaptive reorganization of sensory maps. The Nedivi lab studies the cellular mechanisms that underlie activity-dependent plasticity in the developing and adult brain through studies of neuronal structural dynamics, identification of the participating genes, and characterization of the proteins they encode.

The Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM) aims to create a new field — the Science and Engineering of Intelligence — by bringing together computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists to work in close collaboration. This new field is dedicated to developing a computationally based understanding of human intelligence and establishing an engineering practice based on that understanding.

The Prelec lab studies the psychology and neuroscience of decision-making, favoring problems that involve risky choice, time discounting, self-control and consumer behavior. They also have a longstanding interest in non-verifiable subjective judgments, specifically, in developing methods for eliciting such judgments and for assessing their quality and credibility. Non-verifiable judgments include forecasts of the remote future, historical conjectures, counterfactual hypotheses, and phenomenological 'first-person' reports of internal states.

The Saxe lab studies Theory of Mind as a case study in the deeper and broader question: how does the brain - an electrical and biological machine - construct abstract thoughts? We use functional neuroimaging, behavioural studies with kids and adults, patient studies, and transcranial magnetic stimulation to study abstract representations in the human brain. In addition to Theory of Mind, our recent research investigates brain development, moral reasoning, causal reasoning, and language. We are interested in students or post-docs with backgrounds in philosophy, computer science, or systems neuroscience, in addition to psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Current research in the Schneider lab involves axon regeneration in the central nervous system with functional recovery; special topics in human neuropsychology and perception; studies of the brains of sea mammals.

Using a combination of experimental and computational modeling techniques, research in the Sinha laboratory focuses on understanding how the human brain learns to recognize objects through visual experience and how objects are encoded in memory. The lab's experimental work on these issues involves studying healthy individuals and also those with neurological disorders such as autism. A key initiative of the lab is Project Prakash; this effort seeks to accomplish the twin goals of providing treatment to children with disabilities and also understanding mechanisms of learning and plasticity in the brain.

The Sur laboratory studies the development, plasticity and dynamics of circuits in the cerebral cortex of the brain. The laboratory’s goal is to discover fundamental mechanisms of brain wiring and processing, and how they go awry in brain disorders.

The main research interest in the Tonegawa laboratory is to decipher brain mechanisms subserving learning and memory. We seek to understand what happens in the brain when a memory is formed, when a fragile short-term memory is consolidated to a solid long-term memory, and when a memory formed previously is recalled on subsequent occasions. We also seek to understand the role of memory in decision-making, and how various external or internal factors, such as reward, punishment, attention and the subject’s emotional state, affect learning and memory. In summary, we study how the central nervous system in the brain enables our mind, with a focus on learning and memory.

The Tye Lab employs a multi-disciplinary approach including optogenetic, in vivo and ex vivo electrophysiological, pharmacological and imaging techniques to find mechanistic explanations for how emotional and motivational states influence behavior, in health and disease.

The Wexler ab/Normal Language Lab seeks to understand the nature of the computational system of human language in its many guises. We study most aspects of linguistic structure, including syntax, semantics, pragmatics and morphology. In pursuing these goals, we take as our primary linguistic data abnormal language, by which we mean nothing more than any system of language that seems to differ from standard adult language for biological reasons, including lack of maturation, difficulties in learning, and genetic variation.

Xu Laboratory is interested in how neurons respond to external stimuli and induce changes in their neuronal properties that eventually lead to the encoding of the information in the neural circuit. This type of activity-dependent long lasting changes is generally called neural plasticity. One form of neural plasticity, the long-lasting changes in synaptic strength, synaptic plasticity is thought to be the cellular substrate for learning and memory. Membrane excitability and intracellular environment respond to incoming neural activity and fluctuate at different temporal domains with potentially different spatial constraints. These fluctuations can influence the induction and expression of synaptic plasticity.