Contact ZIPS organizers at [email protected] for the Zoom link.

Sam Norman-Haignere (Mesgarani Lab)
Hierarchical integration across multiple timescales in human auditory cortex

To derive meaning from sound, the brain must rapidly recognize, remember, and synthesize information across tens to hundreds of milliseconds. To understand how auditory cortex integrates across multiple timescales, we developed a novel method that makes it possible to estimate the integration period of any sensory response. By applying this method to human intracranial recordings, we show that auditory cortex integrates across time hierarchically, with substantially longer integration periods in higher-order regions. Surprisingly, we find that integration periods in auditory cortex are largely unaffected by the duration of sound features, even in higher-order regions that respond selectively to speech and music, raising questions about how auditory cortex recognizes structures like words and musical notes whose duration is highly variable.

Holly Hunsberger (Denny Lab)
Using anxiety as a sex-specific neuropsychiatric biomarker of Alzheimer’s disease

Neuropsychiatric disturbances, such as depression and anxiety, are observed in 90% of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients and are frequent in those at risk for AD. Clinical reports have provided evidence that anxiety symptoms predict the conversion to AD, over and beyond the effects of depression, memory loss, and even atrophy. Here, we aimed to identify the neural ensembles linking anxiety and memory loss following AD progression by utilizing behavioral studies, calcium imaging and whole-brain microscopy, in female and male mice. We are currently working to translate these findings to humans using the Alzheimer’s disease neuroimaging initiative (ADNI) dataset. We have found that in humans, anxiety predicts transition to dementia and that anxiety has a sex-specific effect on brain atrophy.