Publications related to Stimulus control

Attractive and repulsive serial dependence: The role of task relevance, the passage of time, and the number of stimuli

Visual decisions are attracted toward features of previous stimuli. This phenomenon, termed serial dependence, has been related to a mechanism that integrates present visual input with stimuli seen up to 10 to 15 s in the past. It is believed that this mec ...

2023

A striatal circuit balances learned fear in the presence and absence of sensory cues

Ralf Schneggenburger, Olexiy Kochubey, Michael Kintscher

During fear learning, defensive behaviors like freezing need to be finely balanced in the presence or absence of threat-predicting cues (conditioned stimulus, CS). Nevertheless, the circuits underlying such balancing are largely unknown. Here, we investiga ...

eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD2023

Plasticity of sensory representations in the posterior insular cortex during fear learning

Denys Osypenko

Aversively-motivated associative learning allows animals to avoid harm and thus ensures survival. Aversive learning can be studied by the fear learning paradigm, in which an innocuous sensory stimulus like a tone (conditioned stimulus, CS), acquires a nega ...

EPFL2023

Acquisition-dependent modulation of hippocampal neural cell adhesion molecules by associative motor learning

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez

It is widely accepted that some types of learning involve structural and functional changes of hippocampal synapses. Cell adhesion molecules neural cell adhesion molecule (NCAM), its polysialylated form polysialic acid to NCAM (PSA-NCAM), and L1 are promin ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Fear Learning: An Evolving Picture for Plasticity at Synaptic Afferents to the Amygdala

Ralf Schneggenburger, Denys Osypenko, Shriya Palchaudhuri

Unraveling the neuronal mechanisms of fear learning might allow neuroscientists to make links between a learned behavior and the underlying plasticity at specific synaptic connections. In fear learning, an innocuous sensory event such as a tone (called the ...

SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC2022

Towards Understanding Sharpness-Aware Minimization

Nicolas Henri Bernard Flammarion, Maksym Andriushchenko

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a recent training method that relies on worst-case weight perturbations which significantly improves generalization in various settings. We argue that the existing justifications for the success of SAM which are based ...

JMLR-JOURNAL MACHINE LEARNING RESEARCH2022

An insular cortex - lateral amygdala network in fear learning

Shriya Palchaudhuri

Animals are capable of evaluating sensory cues for possible threats and adapting their behaviours accordingly. Fear learning is an evolutionarily conserved behaviour crucial for animal survival, during which sensory percepts with a negative reinforcing qua ...

EPFL2022

Uncovering the neural encoding of behavior in the adult Drosophila motor system

Chin-Lin Chen

One of the most important goals in neuroscience research has always been to understand how animals control their behavior. However, the long focus on the role of brain neurons in behavioral control might be missing the full story. In fact, brain-wide fluct ...

EPFL2022

Octopamine neuron dependent aggression requires dVGLUT from dual-transmitting neurons

Brian Donal McCabe

Neuromodulators such as monoamines are often expressed in neurons that also release at least one fast-acting neurotransmitter. The release of a combination of transmitters provides both "classical" and "modulatory" signals that could produce diverse and/or ...

2020

Determinants of Different Types of Positive Environmental Behaviors: An Analysis of Public and Private Sphere Actions

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Ralph Hansmann

A survey of 1206 participants investigated determinants of positive environmental behaviors (PEBs) in Switzerland. Based on a principle component analysis on data for 23 different PEBs, three behavior types were distinguished: (i) public sphere PEBs with p ...

2020

Determinants of pro-environmental behavior: A comparison of university students and staff from diverse faculties at a Swiss University

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Rafael Laurenti, Ralph Hansmann

In the context of an initiative to become a carbon neutral campus, an online survey (N = 1864) of students, scientists, and administrative and technical staff of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) ...

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2020

The dopaminergic VTA - basal amygdala projection contributes to signal aversive state in fear memory

Wei Tang

Dopamine released from midbrain neurons is an important neuromodulatory signal during associative learning in many forebrain circuits. One model of associative learning is auditory cued fear learning, during which an innocuous sensory percept like a tone ( ...

EPFL2018

Sustained enhancements in inhibitory control depend primarily on the reinforcement of fronto-basal anatomical connectivity

Wietske Van der Zwaag, Bogdan Draganski, Michaël Mouthon

What are the neurophysiological determinants of sustained supra-normal inhibitory control performance? We addressed this question by coupling multimodal neuroimaging and behavioral investigations of experts in fencing who underwent more than 20,000 h of in ...

Springer Heidelberg2017

Hyperdimensional computing for blind and one-shot classification of EEG error-related potentials

José del Rocio Millán Ruiz

The mathematical properties of high-dimensional (HD) spaces show remarkable agreement with behaviors controlled by the brain. Computing with HD vectors, referred to as “hypervectors,” is a brain-inspired alternative to computing with numbers. HD computing ...

Springer Verlag2020

What is new in perceptual learning?

Michael Herzog, Aline Françoise Cretenoud, Lukasz Grzeczkowski

What is new in perceptual learning? In the early days of research, specificity was the hallmark of perceptual learning; that is, improvements following training were limited to the trained stimulus features. For example, training with a stimulus improves p ...

Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO)2017

Hyperdimensional computing for noninvasive brain-computer interfaces: Blind and one-shot classification of EEG error-related potentials

José del Rocio Millán Ruiz

The mathematical properties of high-dimensional (HD) spaces show remarkable agreement with behaviors controlled by the brain. Computing with HD vectors, referred to as "hypervectors," is a brain-inspired alternative to computing with numbers. HD computing ...

2017

The effects of extrinsic stress on somatic markers and behavior are dependent on animal housing conditions

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Guillaume Poirier, Michael van der Kooij, Damien Sébastien Huzard

Properties of the environment play an important role in animal wellbeing and may modulate the effects of external threats. Whereas stressors can affect emotion and impair cognition, environmental enrichment may prevent the occurrence of such negative seque ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2015

The temporal dynamics of feature integration for color and form

Michael Herzog

When two visual stimuli are presented in rapid succession only one fused image is perceived. For example, a red disk followed by a green disk is perceived as a single yellow disk (e.g., Efron, Perc Psychophys, 1973). For two verniers that last 30ms each, i ...

Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology2012

Act Quickly, Decide Later: Long-latency Visual Processing Underlies Perceptual Decisions but Not Reflexive Behavior

Humans largely guide their behavior by their visual representation of the world. Recent studies have shown that visual information can trigger behavior within 150 msec, suggesting that visually guided responses to external events, in fact, precede consciou ...

2011

Assessing cooperative behavior in dynamical networks with applications to brain data

Cristian Carmeli

Capturing the collective coherent spatiotemporal activity from measured data in large ensembles of coupled nonlinear sub-systems has revealed to be a key topic in many areas of applied sciences. Currently, this topic is addressed by considering multivariat ...

EPFL2006