Proud to announce the outcome of a special collaboration with former postdoc Aditya Murthy and his students, Naveen Sendhilnathan and Debaleena Basu, with a father of our field, Mickey Goldberg. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America we report that goal-directed movements can be distinguished from incidental, spontaneous movements by differences in neural spiking statistics and the beta power of local field potentials.
Jake Westerberg and I were honored to publish a review of the neural mechanisms of visual priming in a special issue of Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics celebrating the remarkable career of Charles W. (Erik) Eriksen.
The collaboration with Charles Caskey at Vanderbilt University exploring the effects of focused ultrasound on visual search performance has produced a new publication in Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology.
With Aesef Shaikh, Schall was honored to edit a special issue of the Journal of Computational Neuroscience to celebrate the impactful research career of Lance Optican. For this issue, Martin Paré and I wrote about the problem of saccade initiation.
A new publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America by Jake Westerberg in collaboration with his partner Elizabeth Sigworth and my co-mentoring partner Alex Maier describes a new feature of attentional selection by area V4--rhythmic gating of feature preferences along cortical columns.
Welcome to Pranavan Thirunavukkarasu, PhD Graduate program in Biology, Graduate Diploma in Neuroscience, York University
Welcome to Wanyi Lyu, Masters Graduate program in Biology, Graduate Diploma in Neuroscience, York University
Welcome to Sara Sara Chaparian, PhD Graduate program in Biology, York University.
Congratulations to Wanyi Lyu, the 2022 recipient of the Ian P. Howard Family Foundation Graduate Scholarship.
Interdisciplinary team is awarded 3-year York University Catalyzing Interdisciplinary Research Cluster grant for “Translating Brain Signals Across Scales, Species, Sex, and Lifespan”. York faculty include in the Faculty of Science Steven Connor, Kohitij Kar, Ozzy Mermut, Jeff Schall, and Joel Zylberberg; in the Faculty of Health Dorota Crawford, Doug Crawford, Heather Edgell, Erez Freud, Peter Kohler, Liya Ma, Lara Pierce, Shayna Rosenbaum, Jennifer Steeves, and Dale Stevens; and in the Lassonde School of Engineering Hossein Kassiri. Collaborating faculty include Jorge Riera from Florida International University; Clement Hamani, Sean Nestor, and Jennifer Rabin from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre; and Brian Corneil with Julio Martinez Trujillo from the University of Western Ontario.
At Society for Neuroscience 2022 in San Diego well-attended posters were presented by Steven Errington, Beatriz Herrera, Amir Sajad, Jake Westerberg. Scientific and personal relationships continue with earlier group members.
Congratulations to Steven Errington for successfully defending his Doctoral Dissertation for a PhD in Psychological Science, Vanderbilt University. He did this on Sunday morning at the Society for Neuroscience meeting and presented a poster in the afternoon.
At the 6th Human Single-Neuron Meeting Jacob Westerberg and Amir Sajad presented well-received posters while Jeff Schall had opportunity to present the group's work on "The neural basis of EEG indices of performance monitoring and attention".
Now appearing in Nature Communications - "Functional architecture of executive control and associated event-related potentials in macaques" produced with data collected by David Godlove and insightful analyses by co-first authors Amir Sajad and Steven Errington.
Pleased to announce publication in eLife of "Laminar microcircuitry of visual cortex producing attention-associated electric fields" demonstrating association between simultaneously sampled EEG and laminar recordings from area V4. We show that the N2pc is concomitant with activation of supra- and infra-granular layers, and more so in cortical columns that were more color selective.
Pleased to announce publication in NeuroImage of "Resolving the mesoscopic missing link: Biophysical modeling of EEG from cortical columns in primates". Led by Beatriz Herrera and Jake Westerberg, this collaboration demonstrates more decisively than before the sources of the N2pc index of visual attention and demonstrates a dissociation between biophysical and computational contributions to an event-related potential.
Congratulations to Jacob Westerberg for successfully defending his Doctoral Dissertation for a PhD in Psychological Science, Vanderbilt University
Enjoyed conversation on Decision and Eye Movements with Paul Middlebrooks on BRAIN INSPIRED
Pleased to announce publication in Psychological Review of "Salience by competitive and recurrent interactions: Bridging neural spiking and computation in visual attention". A computational theory is developed that explains how visual neurons in the frontal eye field come to represent the salience of items in a visual search array. The model is called Salience by Competitive and Recurrent Interactions (or SCRI, pronounced "scry", to play on a 16th century term referring to foretelling a future event through use of a device like a crystal ball). Building from the formal model of attentional selection and decision-making developed by Smith & Sewell (2013), SCRI accounts for the variation in evolution of target selection signals across FEF neurons. Moreover, the SCRI output given to the GAM model of accumulator dynamics predicted choices and response times and replicated the trajectories of FEF movement neurons. Not only does SCRI explain how one kind of evidence for visual decision making can arise, it provides a novel computational account of the diversity of FEF visual neurons.
The Schall research group in Nashville celebrates the holidays.
March - With Brooks Fu and Ueli Rutishauser, Amir, Steven, and Jeff co-authored a review of error monitoring by medial frontal circuits in humans and monkeys. See it in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
April - Jake Westerberg was among only 12% of applicants to receive a Long-term fellowship from the Human Frontier Science Program Organization to support his postdoctoral research training with Pieter Roelfsema at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience.
May - Pranavan Thirunavukkarasu was awarded an Ontario Graduate Scholarship for the 2023-2024 academic year.
May - Harry Parmar, an undergraduate student from Queen's University, joined the group for the summar. He is co-supervised by Professor Martin Paré at Queen's.
May - With Owen Jones, the Weaver Chair in Law, Brain, and Behavior at Vanderbilt University, Connected Minds: Neural and Machine Systems for a Healthy, Just Society hosted a meeting to establish bridges between the communities of scientists and scholars exploring the intersection of law and neuroscience. Jones' and Schall's co-author colleagues Morris Hoffman, a retired district court judge in Denver, Colorado, and Francis Shen from Harvard University met with their Canadian counterparts including Jennifer Chandler from the University of Ottawa.
May - Very happy to hood Jake and Steven and Vanderbilt University Commencement. Jake is doing postdoctoral training with Pieter Roelfsema at the Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience. Steven is doing postdoctoral training with Ilya Monosov at Washington University School of Medicine.
May - Happy to return to Vision Science Society meeting in St Pete Beach, Florida.
July - After a 4-year pause, we enjoyed returning to the Gordon Research Conference on Eye Movements, this time at Mount Holyoke College.
August - The lab group enjoyed some time on Toronto Island. That's Harry Parmar, Wanyi Lyu, Jeff, Michelle, and Pran Thirunavukkarasu.
September - The group has grown with the addition of two undergraduate neuroscience students from YorkU: Rivke van Klei and Rebecca Werner.
September - Collegial collaboration at its best as Nick Gaspelin, Dominique Lamy, Howard Egeth, Heinrich Liesefeld, Dirk Kerzel, Ananya Mandal, Mathias Müller, Anna Schubö, Heleen Slagter, Brad Stilwell, Dirk van Moorselaar, and Jeff Schall co-authored a comprehensive, critical, synthetic review on the distractor positivity event-related potential that appeared in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. This was one product of a Research Group sponsored by the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Munich organized around the topic of Handling Visual Distraction.
September - Jake Westerberg, with Geoff Woodman, Alex Maier, and me, has published new evidence that a pop-out target is detected during the first step of processing in area V4. See it in Nature Communications
October - Enjoyed a wonderful meeting at the 2023 International Conference on Motivational and Cognitive Control in Lyon, France. The venue was Palais Hirsh of Université Lyon 2. Overlooking the large amphitheater is a large fresco by Jean-Joseph Weertz, which portrays an eloquence competition at Lugdunum. The scene is portrayed on the right bank of the Saône before the hill of Fourvière. The competition proceeds as a speaker declaims in front of the emperor Caligula, in a red toga and his wife Cesonia with various spectators surrounding. On the right, an defeated orator is unceremoniously taken to be thrown into the Saône. Speakers during the MCC meeting were not treated so severely.
November - Guided by Jorge Riera, Beatriz Herrera with Amir Sajad, Steven Errington, and me published a biophysical model explaining how cellular properties can generate error-related EEG. See it in Cerebral Cortex.
November - Thomas Reppert and Rich Heitz published in Cell Reports the first neurophysiological description of contributions of medial frontal cortex to speed-accuracy tradeoff.
The product of a wonderful “adversarial” collaboration led by Heinrich Liesefeld with Dominique Lamy was published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. The other coauthors are Nicholas Gaspelin, Joy J. Geng, Dirk Kerzel, Harriet A. Allen, Brian A. Anderson, Sage Boettcher, Niko A. Busch, Nancy B. Carlisle, Hans Colonius, Dejan Draschkow, Howard Egeth, Andrew B. Leber, Hermann J. Müller, Jan Philipp Röer, Anna Schubö, Heleen A. Slagter, Jan Theeuwes, and Jeremy Wolfe. The group clarified concepts, terms, and methods used to investigate visual distraction in visual search. Readers will find a glossary of how key terms can be used to improve measurement of phenomena and communication across theories. This was another product of a Research Group sponsored by the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Munich organized around the topic of Handling Visual Distraction.