Neuro-CoE Seminar Series

Recent work has found that neural responses to the same input can exhibit progressive drift over days and weeks. This “representational drift” can vary substantially between regions, and is thought to depend on neuroanatomical location. However, individual neocortical regions are known to process many streams of information in parallel. In this talk, I will present data from the lab in which we used chronic two-photon calcium imaging to track thousands of cortical neuron responses during either passive sensory stimulation or active performance of a behavioral task. We find that neurons in both sensory and association regions can encode distinct variables with differential levels of representational stability.
Together, this work indicates that the storage of multiplexed representations at a range of timescales is a general feature of mammalian neocortex. I will conclude by discussing the ramifications of these findings for the long-term storage of memory traces in continually changing biological networks.

About the Speaker

Michael Goard completed his Ph.D. in Neuroscience with Professor Yang Dan at UC Berkeley and his postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Mriganka Sur at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty of UC Santa Barbara in 2016, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His lab investigates the neural circuitry underlying our ability to perceive, process, and store visual and spatial information.