Alice will be presenting a paper that looks at how motivation can penetrate and guide early visual processing. Please RSVP by next next Monday evening if you are interested in joining.

Leila will be presenting a paper that looks at how we integrate value in our everyday choices. Please RSVP by Monday evening if you are interested in joining.

Neurobiology of value integration: when value impact valuation
Park et al. J Neuroscience (2011), vol 31, pp. 9307-9314
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/25/9307.full

Dirk will be presenting a paper that singles out frontal feedback as a signature of consciousness. Please RSVP by Monday evening if you are interested in joining.

Mathieu will be presenting on "Circular analysis in systems neuroscience: the dangers of double dipping." Please RSVP by Monday evening if you would like to attend.

Erik will be presenting on "ectrical synapses control hippocampal contributions to fear learning and memory." Please RSVP by Monday evening if you would like to attend.

Tamara will be presenting on "Neuronal Dynamics Underlying High- and Low-Frequency EEG Oscillations Contribute Independently to the Human BOLD Signal." Please RSVP by Monday evening if you would like to attend.

Cendri will be presenting "Theta-Burst Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Alters Cortical Inhibition."
Please RSVP by Tuesday evening if you would like to attend.

Shabnam Hakimi will be presenting "A selective role for dopamine in stimulus–reward learning." Please RSVP by Monday evening if you'd like to attend.

Alice Lin will be presenting "Detecting individual memories through the neural decoding of memory states and past experience". Please RSVP by Tuesday evening if you'd like to attend.

EunJung Hwang will be presenting "Dendritic organization of sensory input to cortical neurons in vivo". Please RSVP by Tuesday 5/18 if you'd like to attend.

Sweta Agrawal will be presenting two papers. Please RSVP by Tuesday evening if you'd like to attend.

We have all heard at one time or other about place/spatial memory work done in mice, and the role of the hippocampus in this type of memory. However, relatively recently, many scientists have begun looking at the same question in Drosophila. I thought looking over these articles might bring up some interesting questions like what exactly is place memory, how valid is the paradigm being used with Drosophila, and do insects process spatial information in any way that is similar to vertebrates?

Erik Schomburg will be presenting "Impact of spikelets on hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cell activity during spatial exploration". Please RSVP by Tuesday evening if you'd like to attend.

Note from Erik: "This study looks interesting to me because it looks at how subthreshold membrane activity, which has been difficult to observe experimentally, correlates with behavior and the spatial map, and how this drives the spiking activity."

This week Peter Weir will be presenting two papers. Please RSVP by Tuesday evening if you'd like to attend.

Teaser: These two papers explore hearing in insects. This little-discussed modality provides an interesting case study of sensory transduction and its behavioral consequences.

Dominic Rizzo will be presenting three short papers. Please RSVP by Tuesday evening if you'd like to attend.

Teaser:
I'm going to cover a set of three papers with the common theme of embedded intelligence. They're each pretty short, but taken cumulatively point at some interesting correlations between concrete experiences and how they impact our perception of abstract ideas like value.

Xoana Troncoso will be presenting "Changes of mind in decision-making". Please RSVP by Tuesday evening if you'd like to attend.

From "Faculty of a 1000":
"This study presents interesting findings suggesting that human subjects can change their minds after making an initial decision about which arm movement to perform by continuing to process previously acquired sensory evidence about action choices that is still in the central processing "pipeline", even if no new sensory evidence is available from the environment after the initiation of the movement."
http://f1000biology.com/article/id/1448979

Tamara Knutsen will be presenting. Please RSVP by Tuesday evening if you'd like to attend.

Lindsay Bremner will be presenting "Driving fast-spiking cells induces gamma rhythm and controls sensory responses". Please RSVP by Tuesday evening if you'd like to attend.

From Lindsay:
"This recent article was one of a pair that used the new technique of optogenetic manipulation to investigate the basis and function of cortical gamma oscillations, which are believed to be crucial for information processing in the brain. The authors test the hypothesis that gamma oscillations are induced by a specific subset of interneurons, and go on to look at the effect of oscillatory phase on the processing of a single sensory input (whisker deflection). I picked the paper because it demonstrates the powerful nature of this new technique for addressing important in vivo network questions, and also because the authors attempt to look at what the oscillations might mean for the processing of real sensory stimuli. "

This week David Koos will be presenting "Grueneberg Ganglion Cells Mediate Alarm Pheromone Detection in Mice". Please RSVP by Tuesday evening if you'd like to attend.

Marie Suver will be presenting a paper describing the response properties of motion-sensitive interneurons in Drosophila using whole-cell patch-clamp recordings. Please RSVP by Tuesday evening if you'd like to attend.

I will be presenting "Gene therapy for red-green colour blindness in adult primates". Please leave a comment or email me by Tuesday evening if you would like to attend.

If you are new, the CNS Journal Club meets to discuss journal articles that are of interest to the CNS community. We typically meet twice a month on Wednesdays at Noon for lunch and discussion. To be added to the mailing list, please sign up at http://www.klab.caltech.edu/mailman/listinfo/cns-jclub

After a few weeks hiatus, this week Jeroen Van Boxtel will be presenting Reynolds & Heeger's normalization model of attention.

Please let me know by Tuesday evening if you would like to attend. Lunch will be served.

This week Dominic Rizzo will be presenting.

From the author's summary: "We introduce a measure that quantifies how much integrated information is generated by a discrete dynamical system in the process of transitioning from one state to the next [... and ...] present numerical analyses of basic examples, which match well against neurobiological evidence concerning the neural substrates of consciousness."

Please email me by Tuesday evening if you would like to attend. Lunch will be served.