Event:

High-level cognition is supported by a distributed brain network with the prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex as major hubs. Little is known about how the cognitive brain centers represent and interpret sensory information to give rise to intelligent, goal-directed behavior. I will report recent work combining multi-site recordings from large populations of individual neurons in awake behaving animals that provide a window into the mechanisms that underlie working memory, filtering of distracting information, and decision-making. I will then highlight novel, translational approaches taken by our laboratory to bridge the gap between animal and human studies of cognitive functions. To be able to formulate general, species-independent principles of cognitive processing we are working towards a better understanding of human cognition at single-cell resolution.