Recovery after inactivation

We recently discovered that inactivation of parietal regions in the monkey initially induces a spatial hemineglect and deficit in decision-making behavior, but that behavior returns back to normal within tens of minutes. Electrophysiological recordings confirmed that behavioral compensation was not due to recovery of activity at the inactivated site. Instead, compensation must be due to changes in neural activity patterns in other areas.

Flexible behavior

The extraordinary behavioral recovery illustrates the fascinating flexibility in the primate brain: when activity in one of the nodes of the decision-making network gets disrupted, information can be rerouted to other regions to restore behavior. Studying the rerouting of information after disrupting neural activity lets us address one of the major challenges in systems neuroscience: how can information flexibly flow through large-scale brain circuits to allow for the flexible behavior that is a hallmark of primate cognition?

Approach

We combine sophisticated behavioral tasks with high-channel electrophysiology and causal manipulations of neural activity in the macaque monkey. We develop computational models to generate testable predictions about how activity of single neurons and large neural populations change across the brain, and how reward plays a role in establishing compensation.

Goal

Eventually, we hope that the impact of our research will be 1) a better understanding of the flexible routing of information in the healthy primate brain, and 2) a better understanding of compensatory mechanisms that occur after a stroke or traumatic brain injury, allowing us to augment compensatory mechanisms.