Brain-related disorders impact almost everyone, either directly or through family or friends. For many of the disorders, whether they’re psychiatric or neurological, there are basic scientific descriptions and valuable treatment options, but none has a satisfactory cure because the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood.

The federal government launched the BRAIN Initiative in 2013 to ignite the development and application of new technologies needed for major advances toward understanding the brain. Carnegie Mellon University’s Rob Kass believes brain research is in desperate need of cutting-edge statistics, which can and should supply a crucial link between new, highly complex data and the thorough scientific explanations the research aims to generate.

As the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies’ 2017 R.A Fisher Lecturer, Kass outlined his case in “The Importance of Statistics: Lessons From the Brain Sciences.” Read more…

After graduating with a Ph.D. in neural computation from Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) in 2014, Kubra Komek made the switch to the medtech industry.

Komek’s degree comes in handy every day as a regional clinical research manager for the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and Turkey. Komek manages the execution and regional strategy of clinical studies at Medtronic and plays a role in connecting local commercial teams with clinical teams to disseminate the clinical evidence of their therapies more effectively. She also develops expertise in cardiovascular, neuromodulation, diabetes and surgical therapies.

The CNBC is a joint center between the University of Pittsburgh and CMU that trains the next generation of neuroscientists through an interdisciplinary graduate and postdoctoral training program and fosters close collaborations between faculty. The center integrates Pitt’s strengths in basic and clinical neuroscience with CMU’s strengths in psychology, computer science, biological sciences, engineering and statistics. Read more…

Carnegie Mellon University’s Anna Fisher has received a four-year, $751,000 grant to study the effect of pictures in books for beginning readers. Fisher, associate professor of psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, will work to understand whether design of reading materials for beginning readers can be optimized taking into account children’s developing attention regulation skills.

This research will be conducted in collaboration with Karrie Godwin (DC’15), who received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from CMU and was a fellow in the Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER). Godwin is currently an assistant professor at Kent State University. Read more…

Tarr Also Receives CMU Trustee Professorship of Vision Science

AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of several highly regarded journals, including “Science.” Fellows are elected by their peers to honor their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.

Carnegie Mellon has also named Tarr the Trustee Professor of Vision Science. Read more…

Carnegie Mellon University’s Roberta Klatzky, a world-renowned expert in cognition who examines the relationships between human perception and action, with a focus on touch, has been elevated to a fellow in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world’s largest technical professional organization.

The IEEE fellow status is a distinction reserved for select members who have demonstrated extraordinary accomplishments in an IEEE field of interest. Klatzky, the Charles J. Queenan Professor of Psychology, is being recognized for contributions to human visual, auditory and haptic perception in robotics and virtual environments.

“Bobby is one of our most accomplished scientists and educators. Her work exemplifies the kind of world-class, highly interdisciplinary research that we regard as uniquely CMU. Her work has real-world impact, and it is wonderful that the IEEE has recognized her many contributions,” said Michael J. Tarr, head of the Department of Psychology and the Trustee Professor of Vision Science.

Klatzky, who holds appointments in the Department of Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), considers her research as a cognitive scientist who focuses on perception to be far from what most people think of as psychology. She became interested in perception while studying math at the University of Michigan and believes that her math background has been invaluable, given the quantitative nature of her work and her close collaboration with researchers in engineering and the life sciences. (more…)

Grants Support Creation of New Technologies for Understanding the Brain

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Departments of Biological Sciences and Chemistry, Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center (MBIC) and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) have received close to $7.5 million in new funding from the National Institutes of Health through the federal BRAIN Initiative to support innovative research and develop tools that will rapidly advance brain research.

“Carnegie Mellon’s combined expertise in biology, psychology, computer science and engineering has positioned us to be at the forefront of creating new tools and technologies for neuroscience,” said Alison Barth, professor of biological sciences, interim director of CMU’s BrainHub neuroscience initiative and faculty member in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC). “The federal BRAIN Initiative’s support is invaluable to increasing our understanding of how the brain communicates.” Read more…

New Non-invasive Approach Reveals Brain Mechanisms of Auditory Attention

How is it that we are able—without any noticeable effort—to listen to a friend talk in a crowded café or follow the melody of a violin within an orchestra?

A team led by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and Birkbeck, University of London has developed a new approach to how the brain singles out a specific stream of sound from other distracting sounds. Using a novel experimental approach, the scientists non-invasively mapped sustained auditory selective attention in the human brain. Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the study lays crucial groundwork to track deficits in auditory attention due to aging, disease or brain trauma and to create clinical interventions, like behavioral training, to potentially correct or prevent hearing issues.

“Deficits in auditory selective attention can happen for many reasons—concussion, stroke, autism or even healthy aging. They are also associated with social isolation, depression, cognitive dysfunction and lower work force participation. Now, we have a clearer understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms responsible for how the brain can select what to listen to,” said Lori Holt, professor of psychology in CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and a faculty member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC). (Read more…)

Imagine being on the cusp of stepping off a curb to cross the street when, suddenly, you see a car rapidly approaching. Being able to quickly cancel an incipient action, as in this imagined situation, is thought to depend on a network of brain areas that includes the subthalamic nucleus (STN, part of the basal ganglia) as a critical node. A widely-accepted current theory is that neurons in the STN transmit a stop signal that inhibits brain activity related to action initiation. This theory is clinically important because impairment of the stopping function may be a substrate for impulse control disorders. Surprisingly, however, single-unit recording evidence for such an STN role is sparse. Moreover, it has been unclear how that theory relates to well-established view that the STN is divided into segregated functional territories within which neural activity often correlates positively with limb movement per se, task switching, or proactive action control.

In a recent paper in eLife, “A selective role for ventromedial subthalamic nucleus in inhibitory control” Benjamin Pasquereau and Rob Turner addressed those gaps in knowledge.

Non-human primates were trained to perform a task that distinguishes reactive and proactive action inhibition, action switching and skeletomotor function. Single-unit neuronal activity was recorded from the STN during this task. Pasquereau and Turner identified separate populations of STN neurons whose activity encoded action stopping and action switching. These neurons responded within the short time latency required for the activity to actually contribute to stopping and switching behavior. Remarkably, both of those neuronal types were restricted to the most ventral medial region of the STN, a region known to receive inputs from cortical areas involved in cognitive and limbic functions. In contrast, STN neurons with activity related to proactive action control and to simple movement were located in other more dorsal and lateral regions of the STN.

Figure caption: (A) Population-averaged activities of STN neurons that showed a neural cancellation time within the SSRT. Spike density functions are aligned on switch-stop signal presentation (red) and the equivalent time in latency-matched go trials (black) were normalized by subtracting the baseline activity (500-ms before the signal) and grouped according to the response pattern evoked in neuronal activity during stopping: increase or decrease in firing relative to latency-matched go trials (Switch-stop and Movement cells, respectively). The width of the spike density function line indicates the population SEM. (B) Topography of cell types in the STN. Two- and three-dimensional plots of cell type distributions based on coordinates from the recording chamber. AP: anterior-posterior plane.

These results bring into congruence several previously divergent views of STN function. Strikingly, observation of stop-related activity in a discrete anterior ventromedial region of STN provides support for the idea that this region of the STN may be an effective target for neuromodulation therapies to treat impulse control disorders such as OCD and Tourette’s.

Marlene Cohen, Associate Professor (CNUP, Pitt) and associate director of the CNBC, has been awarded a 2018 Troland Award from the National Academy of Science for her work in understanding information processing in the visual system. The National Academy announcement notes that her work “employs a combination of mathematics and experimental neuroscience to study how visual information is encoded and processed in groups of neurons; how important information is then extracted; and how the brain is enabled to make quick decisions to act based on that information.”

Cohen is the fourth CNBC faculty member who has been awarded the prize: Lori Holt (Psychology, CMU) in 2014, David Plaut (Psychology, CMU) and Michael Tarr (Psychology, CMU) in 2003. The award of $75,000 is presented to young researchers in empirical psychology.

Read more about the award here.

Matt Smith (Pitt) and Byron Yu (CMU) have recently been award a four year, $1 million National Science Foundation grant to study perception and cognition using brain computer interfaces.

“When a person views an image many times, they may interpret it very differently depending on their recent experience, attention, and frame of mind,” Smith notes. “This highlights that our perception of the world occurs through a combination of both the sensory environment and our cognitive state. Our project attempts to understand how these two aspects are combined, which is of critical importance for perception and behavior. We apply advanced statistical approaches to brain activity in large groups of neurons in real time, enabling us to estimate the brain’s sensory and cognitive state from moment to moment, and give the subject feedback immediately. This “closed loop” is an ideal configuration to address basic scientific questions and optimize training to guide behavior.”

Read more about the work here…

Renowned auditory neuroscientist Barbara Shinn-Cunningham will help establish a new, cross-disciplinary neuroscience institute that will create innovative tools and technologies critical to advancing brain science. more here…

In a collaborative effort, three CNBC faculty members and their labs from both Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh published their research in Nature Neuroscience. They examined the changes that take place in the brain when learning a new task. To truly see how neural activity changes during learning, we need to look bigger—at populations of neurons, rather than one neuron at a time, which has been the standard approach to date.

Aaron Batista, Associate professor, Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh, Steve Chase, Associate professor, Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon and Byron Yu, Associate professor of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon used a brain-computer interface (BCI), where subjects move a cursor on a computer screen by thought alone. As with learning to play a new sport, they found that subjects learned to control the cursor more accurately with practice. They then investigated how the activity in the brain changed during learning that enabled the improved performance. They found that, on a time scale of a few hours, the brain does not reconfigure its neural activity to maximize the speed and accuracy by which it moves the cursor. Read more…

Computer Science and CNBC faculty member David Touretzky (CMU Robotics) is leading an effort to establish national guidelines for artificial intelligence education in K-12.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) have formed a joint working group to develop national guidelines for teaching K-12 students about artificial intelligence. Inspired by CSTA’s national standards for K-12 computing education, the “AI for K-12” guidelines will define what students in each grade band should know about about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. The working group will also create an online resource directory where teachers can find AI-related videos, demo software, and activity descriptions they can incorporate into their lesson plans.

“There is huge public interest in AI right now” said Touretzky. “Adults are excited by the prospect of self-driving cars and intelligent assistants, but also apprehensive about the impact of these technologies on future employment. It’s important that our children be given accurate information about AI so they can understand this technology that is reshaping our lives.”

Dr. Fred G. Martin, chair of the board of directors of CSTA and an Associate Dean at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said: “Computer science teachers are eager to discuss AI with their students, but may not be that familiar with the subject. The guidelines and resources directory will be constructed by working educators in partnership with AI researchers so that teachers get the support they want.” AAAI President Dr. Subbarao Kambhampati of Arizona State University and incoming President Dr. Yolanda Gil of the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute jointly announced that a workshop led by the “AI for K-12” working group will take place in Washington DC in October as part of the association’s annual Fall Symposium Series. “As the leading professional organization for AI researchers and practitioners, AAAI looks forward to this dialog between AI experts and the educators who will be helping future generations build meaningful, productive lives in the company of intelligent machines,” they said.

For more information, contact ai4k12@aaai.org.

The fourth “CNBC State of the Art” panel took place on May 31st at the Mellon Institute, focused on the basal ganglia. The topic, “What is the function of the basal ganglia?”, was addressed by CNBC faculty members Aryn Gittis (CMU Biology), Rob Turner (Pitt Neurobiology), Tim Verstynen (CMU Psychology), Eric Yttri (CMU Biology). Seventy CNBC members attended the session to listen to an introduction to the basal ganglia and four perspectives on basal ganaglia function. Comprehensive discussion followed.

Tim Verstynen argued for understanding basal ganglia function in terms of a Marrian explanatory program where different levels of analysis are pursued. Given this approach, he argued that the circuitry of the basal ganglia does not function as independent levers in control of action selection, but rather dynamically compete for the levers of control. For more from the Verstynen lab, see: http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~coaxlab/publications.html

Eric Yttri took issue with an action selection model of basal ganglia function, and provided a different perspective: a primary function of the basal ganglia is controlling response gain (“vigor”). That is, the basal ganglia’s influence is not in selection of action but in the control of action execution, like a volume nob that controls the gain of response. For more from the Yttri lab, see: https://www.bio.cmu.edu/laboratories/yttri/publications/

Rob Turner also raised questions about the standard account of the basal ganglia function in action selection. This account implies certain causal relations between basal ganglia and other parts of the brain, relations that are not borne out by careful measurements of brain activity. For more from the Turner lab, see: https://turnerlab.sni.pitt.edu/publications/

Aryn Gittis noted that while much attention has been focused on the basal ganglia’s connections to cortex and thalamus, it is linked to the superior colliculus, locomotor brainstem, and habenula (feel free to Google that). These evolutionary more ancient connections underwrite the important role that the basal ganglia plays in habitual and automatic behaviors. For more from the Gittis lab, see: https://www.bio.cmu.edu/labs/gittis/publications.html

Previous panels focused on vision, synapses and circuits, and cortical motor control with strong turnout from the community and vigorous discussions. Future panels will occur at least once a year.

Considerable efforts in neuroscience research have focused on studying the differential contributions of the basal ganglia and the cerebellum to behavior. These subcortical structures perform many of their functions through interactions with the cerebral cortex. Although both the basal ganglia and the cerebellum influence many of the same cortical areas, they do so via distinct thalamic nuclei. As a consequence, they have been thought to be independent and to communicate only at the level of the cerebral cortex.

In a Review recently published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Andreea Bostan and Peter Strick build upon their anatomical discoveries of two di-synaptic pathways linking the basal ganglia and the cerebellum to propose a novel framework in which these structures form nodes in a densely interconnected network.

Figure: Anatomical connections between the basal ganglia and the cerebellum.
a | A study using retrograde transneuronal transport of rabies virus in monkeys revealed a disynaptic pathway from the dentate nucleus (DN) to the putamen. Rabies virus was injected into the putamen and underwent retrograde transport to first-order neurons that project to the striatum (for example, neurons in the intralaminar thalamic nuclei) and then retrograde transneuronal transport to second-order neurons that innervate the first-order neurons. The second-order neurons in the cerebellum were located primarily in the DN. b | A study using retrograde transneuronal transport of rabies virus in monkeys revealed a disynaptic pathway from the subthalamic nucleus (STN) to the cerebellar cortex. Rabies virus was injected into the lateral cerebellar cortex and underwent retrograde transport to first-order neurons that project to the cerebellar cortex (for example, neurons in the pontine nuclei (PN)) and then retrograde transneuronal transport to second-order neurons that innervate the first-order neurons. The study revealed second-order neurons labelled in the basal ganglia, primarily in the STN.

Bostan and Strick provide a comprehensive overview of the recent literature that relates the anatomical pathways (Figure) with functional interactions between the basal ganglia and the cerebellum in rodents, non-human primates, and humans. They discuss evidence that the interconnections between the basal ganglia, the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex are topographically organized and create functionally distinct networks that operate over the domains of movement, cognition, and perhaps emotion. This perspective challenges basic neuroscientists and clinicians to move beyond considerations of basal ganglia- and cerebellar-specific tasks or disorders. Instead, they suggest that questions about basal ganglia or cerebellar function and dysfunction should be reframed to consider the entire basal ganglia–cerebellar–cerebral cortical network. Read more.

The highly competitive prize is awarded for outstanding research from the last three years as described in a 1,500 word essay. Gittis’ essay will be published in the Aug. 3 issue of Science.

Gittis writes about how, while looking to understand the fundamental biology of the brain’s basal ganglia, her lab discovered a class of neurons that could be targeted and stimulated to restore movement in a mouse model for Parkinson’s disease.

The human brain is densely packed with neurons connected in elaborate circuits. Electrical stimulation to targeted areas of the basal ganglia has proven to be a promising therapy for movement disorders. The most famous of these is deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease. However, the dense, complex circuitry of the brain can make the difference between relieving a patient’s symptoms and inducing unwanted behaviors mere nanometers.

“Teasing apart the neural circuitry is not unlike the game pick-up sticks, in which a bunch of colored sticks are heaped in a pile on the floor and players must figure out how to remove them one by one, without bringing the whole pile crashing down,” wrote Gittis, associate professor of biological sciences and a member of the joint CMU/University of Pittsburgh Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. Read more…

Carnegie Mellon University will award the sixth annual Andrew Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brian Sciences to Krishna V. Shenoy, the Hong Seh and Vivian W. M. Lim Professor of Engineering at Stanford University. Shenoy directs the Stanford Neural Prosthetic Systems Lab and co-directs the Stanford Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory, which aims to help restore lost motor function to people with paralysis.

The Carnegie Prize, given by the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, recognizes trailblazers in the mind and brain sciences whose research has helped advance the field and its applications. The CNBC will present the award to Shenoy at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 18, in the Simmons Auditorium A, Tepper Building. As part of the award ceremony, Shenoy will present a talk on “Brain-machine Interfaces: From Basic Science and Engineering to Clinical Trials.”

“Krishna Shenoy is one of the luminaries of neuroscience. He has brought a variety of ideas, and technologies, from engineering to help advance our understanding of the way the brain plans and executes movement. He is also an exemplary mentor, who is widely admired in the community,” said Robert E. Kass, the Maurice Falk Professor of Statistics and Computational Neuroscience.

Shenoy’s neuroscience research investigates the neural basis of movement preparation and generation using a combination of electrophysiological, behavioral, computational and theoretical techniques. His neuroengineering research investigates the design of high-performance neural prosthetic systems, also known as brain-computer interfaces and brain-machine interfaces. These systems translate neural activity from the brain into control signals for prosthetic devices, which assist people with paralysis by restoring lost function

Shenoy has received a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, a McKnight Technological Innovations in Neurosciences Award, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award, the 2010 Stanford University Postdoc Mentoring Award, and was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows. Shenoy serves on the Scientific Advisory boards of the University of Washington’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center), CTRL-Labs Inc., MIND-X Inc. and Heal Inc. He is a consultant for Neuralink Corp.

Carnegie Mellon Press Release

The Department of Biological Sciences and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) at Carnegie Mellon University seek a tenure-track faculty candidate in systems neuroscience at the assistant professor level.

Details here.

Single neurons in the brain’s primary visual cortex can reliably detect straight lines, even though the cellular makeup of the neurons is constantly changing, according to a new study by Carnegie Mellon University neuroscientists, led by Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Sandra Kuhlman. The study’s findings, funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in Scientific Reports on Oct. 16, lay the groundwork for future studies into how the sensory system reacts and adapts to changes.

Most of us assume that when we see something regularly, like our house or the building where we work, our brain is responding in a reliable way with the same neurons firing. It would make sense to assume that the same would hold true when we see simple horizontal or vertical lines.

“The building our lab is in has these great stately columns,” said Kuhlman. “The logical assumption is that as we approach the building each day our brains are recognizing the columns, which are essentially straight lines, in the same way. Scientifically, we had no idea if this was true.”

Additional study authors include: Brian B. Jeon and Professor Steven M. Chase from the CMU Department of Biomedical Engineering and joint Pitt/CMU Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition; Jeffery T. Good from the CMU Department of Biological Sciences; and Alex D. Swain from the University of Pittsburgh Integrative Systems Biology Program.   more…

CNBC and CMU Biology faculty Aryn Gittis received the Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Award which recognizes creativity and originality in research and aims to promote the success of early career researchers. She accepted the award at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in San Diego, Nov. 3-7.

Gittis’ research focuses on understanding the dynamics and function of the basal ganglia, teasing apart the precise neural circuitry. The basal ganglia regulates movement and learning. In its press release, the Society for Neuroscience notes “Aryn Gittis… has quickly established herself as an emerging leader in the study of the basal ganglia, an area of the brain involved in, among other things, voluntary movement. In addition to her basic science research, Gittis is working with a team of neurosurgeons at Allegheny Health Network in Pittsburgh to translate her discoveries into new therapeutic interventions for patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease.”  Read more…