Date: Friday, October 19, 2018
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: Simons Center Conference Room, Building 46, Room 6011, 6th Floor, MIT (43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, 02139 MA)

Speaker: Jakob Voigts, Ph.D.

Affiliation: Simons Fellow, Mark Harnett Lab, MIT

Talk title: Dendritic mechanisms for navigation in retrosplenial cortex
Abstract: Navigation requires associating different streams of information. For example, recognizing a distant skyscraper while facing north vs. facing south has different interpretations for one’s position. Retrosplenial cortex, thought to be the main hub for carrying out such associations during navigation, is well suited to testing how individual neurons can flexibly combine multiple inputs to implement such computations. I will present results using recently developed technology that allows us to combine, for the first time, 2-D navigation with head rotation and conventional 2-photon imaging of dendrites. My findings show that dendritic activity is less modulated by context than the somatic outputs of neurons, suggesting that head-direction input is processed by active dendritic mechanisms. I will discuss how this approach can be used to study the link between within-neuron and network computations in general associative cortical computations.