Theresa Desrochers
Brown University, RI·Neuroscience·Early-career
Every day we keep track of sequences: the order of stops on a bus route, the steps of a routine, the words in a sentence. Sequence monitoring, the active process of tracking where we are in an ordered series of steps, is essential to daily life.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
sequence monitoring
sequence representation
prefrontal cortex
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Use fMRI in behaving macaque monkeys to identify which frontal brain areas track nonmotor, nonspatial sequences, testing whether the medial prefrontal cortex mainly encodes each item's position in the sequence.
- Run parallel fMRI studies in humans performing more abstract sequence tasks to test whether human prefrontal regions play the same roles as the corresponding areas in monkeys.
- Use fMRI maps to guide recordings from single neurons in monkey prefrontal cortex, testing whether lateral prefrontal cells combine ordinal position with temporal context (which item follows which).
- Record single-cell activity and whole-brain fMRI in macaques performing auditory and visual sequence tasks to distinguish ordinal from relational sequence representations.
More about the research
It is distinct from memorizing a list or running off an automatic motor sequence like playing a piano piece. Yet how the brain does it remains largely unknown. When sequential behavior breaks down, as in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), daily life can be badly disrupted. Both projects ask how two parts of the frontal lobe, the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex (LPFC and MPFC), represent sequences. They compare humans with macaque monkeys and pair whole-brain imaging with recordings from single brain cells.
Why it matters
Tracking the order of events underlies learning, language and everyday routines, and illness or injury that impairs it can be devastating. Mapping the prefrontal circuits that monitor sequences could point toward new treatments for disorders where sequential behavior is disrupted, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. It may also inform artificial intelligence systems, which still fail at many sequence problems that people and animals solve easily.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Testing neural mechanisms of sequence monitoring in the frontal cortex across species: integrated fMRI and electrophysiology
NIH · Apr 2023 – Dec 2027
CAREER: Testing the neural representation of sequences in nonhuman primate frontal cortex using fMRI-localized electrophysiology
NSF · Sep 2022 – Aug 2027
Closest labs
Jan Zimmermann
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience
Develop radiofrequency coil hardware for 10.5 Tesla MRI that resolves layer-specific fMRI responses in the macaque cortex, revealing feedforward and feedback signals.
Silvia Bunge
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Neuroscience
Test whether the anterior lateral prefrontal cortex is domain-general by measuring its fMRI activity and connections with other regions during four relational reasoning tasks spanning visual and auditory, spatial and semantic stimuli.
John O'Doherty
California Institute of Technology, CA·Neuroscience
Separate occasion-related noise, meaningful state changes and stable trait differences in computational parameters by administering a computational assessment battery repeatedly over one year online and fitting hierarchical Bayesian models.
The school
Brown University: 23 labs on PI Pages, $375M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.
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