At the pre-meeting symposium at SfN 2015, Inscopix hosted Dr. Howard Eichenbaum, Director of the Center for Memory and Brain at Boston University, who presented his current work on The advantages of large-scale neuronal recordings: Revealing the organization and dynamics of cognitive maps.
Dr. Eichenbaum uses a combination of neuropsychological and electrophysiological studies to understand how the hippocampus and cortical areas encode information and organize memories.
His presentation demonstrated the use of novel techniques like in vivo calcium imaging with the nVista technology to record large-scale neuronal activity that can provide information on the interaction of constituents of neuronal ensembles. This signifies a major shift from simply recording from single neurons (single unit recordings) which can only be used to identify simple trigger features and receptive field properties. He uses this data to understand the response patterns of these populations of neurons under different behavioral conditions, and decode the underlying memory processes in the hippocampus as well as the organization and dynamics of cognitive maps.
View his talk to learn how novel technologies are moving the field forward and are providing qualitative advantages of large-scale population recording in diverse regions of the brain.