Columbia University in the City of New York

Mar 12, 20213:30 pm
Seminar

Zuckerman Institute Postdoctoral Seminar: March

Featuring Andra Mihali (Horga lab) and Martin Escamilla (Lomvardas lab)

March 12th, 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm at Online

Andra Mihali (Horga Lab)

Adjustment of prior beliefs as a candidate mechanism for perceptual insight 
Impaired insight is a crucial aspect of psychosis which can manifest as a reduced ability to recognize when subjective experiences deviate from objective states of the world.  To induce subjective perceptual distortions, we used the motion after-effect illusion. In 44 healthy controls, we employed two conditions, ’see’ vs ’believe’, requiring participants to report their subjective percepts as well as their beliefs about the actual motion direction (left/right), and their confidence reports. We found that participants were overall able to compensate for their distorted percepts when reporting their beliefs. An optimal-observer model was able to capture the data well and revealed that here insight could be implemented as an adjustment of the category prior distribution when reporting beliefs under distorted perception.


Martin Escamilla (Lomvardas Lab)

Understanding the Role of Chromatin and Nuclear Architecture in Olfactory Sensory Neuron Identity
Olfaction is the sense that alerts us to odorants in our environment. The singular expression of one out of a thousand olfactory receptor (OR) genes is essential for the proper function and wiring of mammalian olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs). Studying OR expression also provides a comprehensive model system to elucidate general regulatory principles of stochastic gene expression. OR gene choice requires the complete reorganization of the OSN nuclear architecture, which occurs during neuronal differentiation. During this process, OR genes from different chromosomes converge into specialized nuclear bodies and chromatin compartments. We explore how this process mediates OR silencing and regulates transcriptional activation in the context of the chromatin. 

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