Miller Lab alumnus David Freedman is a winner of the 2016 Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences. Way to go, Dave! Well deserved.
http://www.nasonline.org/programs/awards/troland-research-awards.html
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Miller Lab alumnus Melissa Warden is a winner of a 2015 NIH New Innovator Award.
http://commonfund.nih.gov/newinnovator/Recipients15We couldn’t be prouder of her if she were a Little Lebowski Urban Achiever.
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Video of Earl Miller for the 2015 Professional Achievement Award from the Kent State University Alumni Association.
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Siegel, M., Buschman, T.J., and Miller, E.K. (2015) Cortical information flow during flexible sensorimotor decisions. Science. 19 June 2015: 1352-1355.
During flexible behavior, multiple brain regions encode sensory inputs, the current task, and choices. It remains unclear how these signals evolve. We simultaneously recorded neuronal activity from six cortical regions (MT, V4, IT, LIP, PFC and FEF) of monkeys reporting the color or motion of stimuli. Following a transient bottom-up sweep, there was a top-down flow of sustained task information from frontoparietal to visual cortex. Sensory information flowed from visual to parietal and prefrontal cortex. Choice signals developed simultaneously in frontoparietal regions and travelled to FEF and sensory cortex. This suggests that flexible sensorimotor choices emerge in a frontoparietal network from the integration of opposite flows of sensory and task information.
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Earl Miller is quoted in a Time article about the dangers of multitasking:
You Asked: Are My Devices Messing With My Brain? Time (May 13, 2015)
http://time.com/3855911/phone-addiction-digital-distraction/““Every time you switch your focus from one thing to another, there’s something called a switch-cost,” says Dr. Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Your brain stumbles a bit, and it requires time to get back to where it was before it was distracted.” ““You’re not able to think as deeply on something when you’re being distracted every few minutes,” Miller adds. “And thinking deeply is where real insights come from.”
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Miller Lab alumnus Melissa Warden has been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship.
2015 Sloan Research FellowsWe could not be prouder of her if she were a Little Lebowski Urban Achiever.
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Frequency-specific hippocampal-prefrontal interactions during associative learning
Brincat, S.L. and Miller, E.K. (2015) Nature Neuroscience, advanced online publicationAbstract:
Much of our knowledge of the world depends on learning associations (for example, face-name), for which the hippocampus (HPC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC) are critical. HPC-PFC interactions have rarely been studied in monkeys, whose cognitive and mnemonic abilities are akin to those of humans. We found functional differences and frequency-specific interactions between HPC and PFC of monkeys learning object pair associations, an animal model of human explicit memory. PFC spiking activity reflected learning in parallel with behavioral performance, whereas HPC neurons reflected feedback about whether trial-and-error guesses were correct or incorrect. Theta-band HPC-PFC synchrony was stronger after errors, was driven primarily by PFC to HPC directional influences and decreased with learning. In contrast, alpha/beta-band synchrony was stronger after correct trials, was driven more by HPC and increased with learning. Rapid object associative learning may occur in PFC, whereas HPC may guide neocortical plasticity by signaling success or failure via oscillatory synchrony in different frequency bands. -
MIT News Office: Neurons hum at different frequencies to tell the brain which memories it should store.
New discovery from the Miller LabAnne Trafton | MIT News Office
February 23, 2015
Our brains generate a constant hum of activity: As neurons fire, they produce brain waves that oscillate at different frequencies. Long thought to be merely a byproduct of neuron activity, recent studies suggest that these waves may play a critical role in communication between different parts of the brain.A new study from MIT neuroscientists adds to that evidence. The researchers found that two brain regions that are key to learning — the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex — use two different brain-wave frequencies to communicate as the brain learns to associate unrelated objects. Whenever the brain correctly links the objects, the waves oscillate at a higher frequency, called “beta,” and when the guess is incorrect, the waves oscillate at a lower “theta” frequency. Read more
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MIT News Office: Neurons hum at different frequencies to tell the brain which memories it should store.
New discovery from the Miller LabAnne Trafton | MIT News Office
February 23, 2015
Our brains generate a constant hum of activity: As neurons fire, they produce brain waves that oscillate at different frequencies. Long thought to be merely a byproduct of neuron activity, recent studies suggest that these waves may play a critical role in communication between different parts of the brain.A new study from MIT neuroscientists adds to that evidence. The researchers found that two brain regions that are key to learning — the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex — use two different brain-wave frequencies to communicate as the brain learns to associate unrelated objects. Whenever the brain correctly links the objects, the waves oscillate at a higher frequency, called “beta,” and when the guess is incorrect, the waves oscillate at a lower “theta” frequency. Read more