Replay Dynamics and the role of hippocampal subregion CA2 Computational Neuroscience

Description

Our life is full of experiences of which we remember only few. For an experience to be remembered, corresponding sequences of neural activity have to be replayed in the hippocampus during so called sharp wave-ripples. But how is it decided which experiences are to be remembered and which ones are not?
We hypothesize that this may - at least in part - be a self-organized process within the hippocampus, with multiple sequences simultaneously becoming active at the beginning of a sharp wave-ripple and then competing for their reactivation.

In this project you will be searching for fingerprints of such competition dynamics with state-of-the-art tools from replay analysis on data provided from our collaborators at the McHugh lab at Riken Center for Brain Sciences, Japan. This project can be extended to a Ph.D. thesis within Computational Neuroscience.
For example, in our collaborators' data you may dive deeper by investigating how hippocampal subregion CA2 influences such competition dynamics, as we have previously postulated (Stöber et al, 2019, Hippocampus).

To excel in this project, you should be able to program, have some experience in handling data, and should not be scared of formulas.
If this fits you, do not hesitate to get in touch with us.

The Institut für Neuroinformatik (INI) is a central research unit of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. We aim to understand the fundamental principles through which organisms generate behavior and cognition while linked to their environments through sensory systems and while acting in those environments through effector systems. Inspired by our insights into such natural cognitive systems, we seek new solutions to problems of information processing in artificial cognitive systems. We draw from a variety of disciplines that include experimental approaches from psychology and neurophysiology as well as theoretical approaches from physics, mathematics, electrical engineering and applied computer science, in particular machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision.

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