Social Neuroscience Symposia at the NWG Meeting in Göttingen

Alex Gail and his colleagues from the Sensorimotor Group at the German Primate Center organise a symposium on Neuroscience of naturalistic navigation and foraging in non-human primates to bring together international researchers pioneering the field of neurophysiology in non-human primates during unrestrained behaviors in complex environments. Daniel Huber (University of Geneva) will present the latest development of EthoLoop, a novel tracking system able to follow movements and analyze complex behaviors of unrestrained mouse lemurs in real time in combination with wireless neural recordings. Dora E. Angelaki (NY University) will show how hippocampal and cortical activity in unrestrained rhesus monkeys relate to foraging behavior both in freely moving and virtual reality environments. Zurna Ahmed (German Primate Center) will introduce the Exploration Room, a novel modular experimental setting encouraging unrestrained, yet repetitive full-body behaviors beyond walking in rhesus macaques while recording from the frontoparietal reach network. Irene Lacal and Neda Shahidi (German Primate Center & Leibniz ScienceCampus) will highlight novel paradigms in the Exploration Room for studying spatial cognition during naturalistic solo or dyadic foraging and the frontoparietal representations of dynamic evaluation of choices. Jan Zimmermann (University of Minnesota) will present how unconstrained behavior is organized across multiple spatial and temporal scales in rhesus monkeys and how electrophysiology experiments can give us a unique insight into these processes.The symposium takes place on March 23 from 11 AM to 1 PM at the ZHG.

Dora Angelaki and Jan Zimmermann will also speak in a satellite lecture at the German Primate Center, jointly organised by the ScienceCampus and the SFB 1528 Cognition of Interaction.

On March 24, 2023 (1PM-3PM, ZHG), Caspar Schwiedrzik (European Neuroscience Institute and German Primate Center) organizes a symposium Insights into the neural basis of cognition from human intracranial electrophysiology. This symposium aims to elucidate neural mechanisms underlying human cognitive processes using intracranial recordings. We will address different facets of cognition, taking complimentary perspectives from different recording and analysis techniques; as well as providing insight into ethical aspects and technical challenges when working with patients. Hui Zhang (Bochum) will demonstrate how the reinstatement and transformation of stimulus-specific memories can be studied using multivariate analyses to identify meso- and macroscale networks. Lucia Melloni (Frankfurt) will show how continuous input is segmented into episodic memories using tasks involving sequences and visual narratives using electrocorticography. Randolph Helfrich (Tübingen) will talk about how population dynamics of human prefrontal cortex integrate contextual cues and prior evidence to guide human goal-directed behavior. Caspar Schwiedrzik (Göttingen) )will present recordings with laminar resolution investigating neural computations underlying predictive processing in perception. Marcel Bausch (Bonn) will address the question how content and context are combined to process relevant memories using single neuron recordings in the medial temporal lobe. Together, these talks will provide an exciting overview of the burgeoning field of human intracranial electrophysiology.