Cortical circuits for spatial navigation

My lab seeks to understand how the cerebral cortex performs computations that underlie spatial navigation, toward an understanding of principles for cognition and intelligence. We aim to reveal mechanisms at the level of the building blocks of the nervous system – cell types – and how these building blocks are organized into microcircuits and brain-wide networks. We have developed and combine a variety of approaches to measure, manipulate, and analyze neural circuits across diverse spatial and temporal scales, including technology for virtual reality, optical imaging, optogenetics, molecular sensors, and computational modeling. Our approach brings together cellular, systems, and computational levels of investigation. I will present recent work in which we discovered an inhibitory cell type that signals navigational error corrections in the posterior parietal cortex. I will also present ongoing work demonstrating that this cell type signals errors in other cortical areas as well, suggesting a common circuit mechanism for error-related learning across cortex.