Faculty Member
Biography
NEURAL DYNAMICS: THE NEURAL BASIS OF LEARNING AND MEMORY AND TEMPORAL PROCESSING Behavior and cognition are not the product of isolated neurons, but rather emerge from the dynamics of interconnected neurons embedded in complex recurrent networks. Significant progress has been made towards understanding cellular and synaptic properties in isolation, as well as in establishing which areas of the brain are active during specific tasks. However, elucidating how the activity of hundreds of thousands of neurons within local cortical circuits underlie computations remains an elusive and fundamental goal in neuroscience. The primary goal of my laboratory is to understand how functional computations emerge from networks of neurons. One computation we are particularly interested in is how the brain tells time. Temporal processing refers to your ability to distinguish the interval and duration of sensory stimuli, and is a fundamental component of speech and music perception. To answer these questions the main approaches in my laboratory involve: (1) In Vitro Electrophysiology: Using acute and chronic brain slices we study the spatio-temporal dynamics of cortical circuits, as well as the learning rules that allow networks to develop, organize and perform computations ??? that is, to learn. (2) Computer Simulations: Computer models are used to simulate how networks perform computations, as well as test and generate predictions in parallel with our experimental research. (3) Human Psychophysics: We also use human pyschophysical experiments to characterize learning and generalization of temporal tasks, such as interval discrimination.
Publications
A selected list of publications:
Publications
A selected list of publications:
González VV, Zhang Y, Ashikyan SA, Rickard A, Yassine I, Romero-Sosa JL, Blaisdell AP, Izquierdo A (2024). A special role for anterior cingulate cortex, but not orbitofrontal cortex or basolateral amygdala, in choices involving information. Cerebral Cortex 34(4): bhae135.
Aguirre CG, Woo JH, Romero-Sosa JL, Rivera ZM, Tejada AN, Munier JJ, Perez J, Goldfarb M, Das K, Gomez M, Ye T, Pannu J, Evans K, O’Neill PR, Spigelman I, Soltani A, Izquierdo A (2024). Dissociable contributions of basolateral amygdala and ventrolateral orbitofrontal cortex to flexible learning under uncertainty. The Journal of Neuroscience 44(2): e0622232023.
Ye T, Romero-Sosa JL, Rickard A, Aguirre CG, Wikenheiser AM, Blair HT, Izquierdo A (2023). Theta oscillations in anterior cingulate cortex and orbitofrontal cortex differentially modulate accuracy and speed in flexible reward learning. Oxford Open Neuroscience 2: kvad005.
Hart EE, Blair GJ, O’Dell TJ, Blair HT, Izquierdo A (2020). Chemogenetic modulation and single-photon calcium imaging in anterior cingulate cortex reveal a mechanism for effort-based decisions. The Journal of Neuroscience 40 (29) 5628-5643.
Stolyarova A, Rakhshan M, Hart EE, O’Dell TJ, Peters MAK, Lau H, Soltani A, Izquierdo A (2019). Contributions of anterior cingulate cortex and basolateral amygdala to decision confidence and learning under uncertainty. Nature Communications 10: 4704.
Soltani A and Izquierdo A (2019). Adaptive learning under expected and unexpected uncertainty. Nat Rev Neurosci doi: 10.1038/s41583-019-0180-y.





