The Miller Lab @ MIT

  • Different Neuronal Computations of Spatial Working Memory for Multiple Locations within versus across Visual Hemifields

    Miller Lab

    Matsushima and Tanaka examined the neural correlates of spatial working memory for one vs two locations.  When the two locations were in the same (right or left) hemifield, the level neural activity was intermediate between that elicited from either cue alone.  By contrast, when the cues were presented in opposite hemifields, neural activity to each cue was as if the cue was presented alone.  This lends support to other observations (e.g., Buschman et al 2011) that there are independent capacities for working memory in the right and left visual hemifields, as if the brain was split down the middle.

    Further reading:
    Buschman,T.J., Siegel, M., Roy, J.E. and Miller, E.K. (2011) Neural substrates of cognitive capacity limitations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 108(27):11252-5. View PDF »

  • Videos: Rhythmic Dynamics and Cognition 6-4-13

    Miller Lab
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    See lectures from the Cognitive Rhythms Collaborative conference on Rhythmic Dynamics and Cognition, which took place on June 4, 2013 at MIT.

    Talks:
    Elizabeth Buffalo: Neural Signals for Memory and Space in the Primate Medial Temporal Lobe
    Earl K. Miller: Cognition is Rhythmic
    Robert Knight: Oscillations and Human PFC
    Peter Ulhaas: Neural Oscillations in Schizophrenia: Perspectives from MEG
    Charles Schroeder: Neural Substrates of Temporal Prediction in Active Sensing
    Peter Brown: Beta Oscillations in the Human Basal Ganglia
    Christa van Dort: Optogenetic Activation of Cholinergic Neurons in the PPT Induces REM Sleep
    Rosalyn Doran: Dynamic Causal Modeling and Neurophysiology
    Liam Paninski: Statistical Neuroscience
    Astrid Prinz: How do rhythmically active circuits “analyze” their own activity?

  • Mini-Symposium: Frontiers in Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation – 4/16/14 in Boston

    Miller Lab

    Cognitive Rhythms Collaborative and Center for
    Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology

    Spring 2014 Mini-Symposium
    Frontiers in Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation

    Wednesday, April 16, 2014 at 1 pm

    Boston University Photonics Center 206
    8 Saint Mary Street
    Boston, MA 02215

    1:00 – 1:15  Registration

    1:15 – 2:00  Dr. Lucas Parra, City College of New York
    “Transcranial electrical stimulation: mechanisms and targeting”

    2:00 – 2:45 Dr. Tommi Raij, Massachusetts General Hospital
    “Transcranial magnetic stimulation: mechanisms and navigation”

    2:45 – 3:00  Break

    3:00 – 3:45  Dr. Noah Philip, Alpert Medical School of Brown University
    “Clinical implications of frequency dependent neuromodulation”

    3:45 – 4:30  Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Harvard Medical School
    “Characterizing and guiding brain networks with noninvasive brain stimulation”

    4:30    Discussion / Reception

    Registration free, but required. Email xiaoshi@bu.edu.

  • Selective attention in the honeybee optic lobes precedes behavioral choices

    Miller Lab

    The title pretty much says it all.  Attentional effects in honeybee brains.  Neural responding to an object was enhanced relative to a competing object when the former object was chosen.

  • Behavioral Oscillations in Attention

    Miller Lab

    Song et al examined oscillatory activity in humans performing an attention task.  They found that phase-locking between theta and alpha bands.  An uninformative cue initiated alpha pulse at a theta rhythm that seemed to reflect alternating sampling of the uninformative and informative cues.

  • Visual space is compressed in prefrontal cortex before eye movements

    Miller Lab

    Tirin Moore and colleagues challenge the idea that neuron receptive fields shift in anticipation of eye movements, remapping from the pre-movement location to the post-movement location before the eye actually moves.  They used multiple-electrode recording to provide a detailed maps of the receptive fields before and after movements.  The receptive fields did not remap to reflect the post-movement location.  Instead, all the receptive fields converged toward movement target.  This suggest that the receptive field do not remap, they reflect attention to the movement target.

  • Entrainment of Prefrontal Beta Oscillations Induces an Endogenous Echo and Impairs Memory Formation

    Miller Lab

    Recent studies have suggested that beta-band oscillatory synchrony plays a role in cognition.  For example, different networks of neurons in the prefrontal cortex dynamically synchronize at beta as animals switch between two different task rules (Buschman et al., 2012) suggesting that beta synchrony is forming the neural ensembles for the rules.  Different items simultaneously held in working memory line-up on different phases of beta/low-gamma oscillations, as if the brain is juggling the two items 30 times a second (Siegel et al., 2009). Hanslmayr et al disrupted these fine temporal relations by stimulating the human with beta-band TMS pulses.   Beta stimulation of the left inferior frontal gyrus impaired memory formation while stimulation at other frequencies did not.  There was a beta “echo” that outlasted the stimulation.  Subjects with better beta entrainment showed more memory impairment.  This lends support for the role of beta rhythms in cognition by showing a causal relationship between beta desynchrony and memory.

    This paper:
    Simon Hanslmayr, Jonas Matuschek, Marie-Christin Fellner, Entrainment of Prefrontal Beta Oscillations Induces an Endogenous Echo and Impairs Memory Formation, Current Biology, Available online 27 March 2014, ISSN 0960-9822

    References
    Buschman, T.J., Denovellis, E.L., Diogo, C., Bullock, D. and Miller, E.K. (2012) Synchronous oscillatory neural ensembles for rules in the prefrontal cortex. Neuron, 76: 838-846.  View PDF

    Siegel, M., Warden, M.R., and Miller, E.K. (2009) Phase-dependent neuronal coding of objects in short-term memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106: 21341-21346. View PDF »   Read commentary by Vogel and Fukuda

  • Deep Belief Networks Learn Context Dependent Behavior

    Miller Lab

    Mike Hasselmo and colleagues examined how the brain generalizes and infers new behaviors from previous experience.  They trained different styles of neural network models to learn context-dependent behaviors (i.e., the response to four stimuli, A B C D, mapped onto two different responses X Y differently in different contexts).  There were previously unseen stimuli whose response could be inferred from the other stimuli. They analyzed a Deep Belief Network, a Multi-Layer Perceptron, and the combination of a Deep Belief Network with a Linear Perceptron.  The combination of the Deep Belief Network with Linear Perceptron worked best.

    A Deep Belief Network has multiple layers of hidden units with connections between, but not within, the layers.

  • Attention in the real world: toward understanding its neural basis

    Miller Lab
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    Peelen and Kastner extend studies of attention in the lab (using simple, neutral displays) to the real world (complex, meaningful scenes).  They discuss interactions between what and where templates shaped by object familiarity, scene context, and memory

  • Neural mechanisms of dual-task interference and cognitive capacity limitation

    Miller Lab

    Think you can multitask well?  Watanabe and Funahasi show that task information signaled by neurons in the prefrontal cortex degrade when animals perform a competing, concurrent task.