Talk at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig

Lukas visited the labs of Andrej Bicanski and Christian Doeller at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. This enabled many exciting discussions with their lab members on cognitive maps, neural computations related to spatial navigation, and human ripples - especially with Fei Wang, Marit Petzka, Zhiming Jia, Yangwen Xu, Qiaoli Huang, Max Hinrichs, and Salma Elnagar. Many thanks for the invitation and the hospitality!

During his visit, Lukas also gave a talk at the “Mind Meeting,” hosted by Christian Doeller, Andrej Bicanski, and Rana Amini.

Talk title: Probing the cellular correlates of cognitive maps through human single-neuron recordings.

Talk abstract: Cognitive maps are mental representations that organize information along continuous feature dimensions. Research in animal models indicates that functional cell types in the hippocampus and surrounding brain regions constitute the neural building blocks of cognitive maps, but it still remains uncertain whether such cell types also exist in the human medial temporal lobe. In this talk, I will discuss results from studies with single-unit recordings in epilepsy patients aimed at identifying cellular correlates of cognitive maps in humans. While tuning profiles are generally weaker than in animal models, these studies suggest the presence of human cell types with allocentric and egocentric tuning properties in both spatial and emotional contexts. These results provide an entry point for translating cellular observations from animals to the human brain, and for testing their role in human cognitive maps.

Link to the talk: https://doellerlab.com/kunz/ Link to the Doeller lab: https://doellerlab.com/ Link to the Bicanski lab: https://www.cbs.mpg.de/psychology/neural-computation