David Tank
Princeton University, NJ·Neuroscience
Holding information in mind for a few seconds and using it to make a choice are basic mental abilities, known as working memory and decision-making. Recording studies show that during decision tasks, groups of neurons across the mouse brain often fire in sequences, one after another, rather than holding a steady signal.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biophysics
Physics
- Topics
working memory
decision-making
evidence accumulation
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Identify which task features (active navigation, passive navigation, or visual stimulation) produce sequential neural activity, by recording from relevant mouse brain regions during tasks that isolate each feature.
- Test whether the dorsal medial striatum acts as a master temporal scaffold, by slowing its activity with focal cooling while recording sequences in the neocortex and hippocampus.
- Build moving bump attractor, competing-chains, and position-evidence multiplicative network models of choice-selective sequences, and derive predictions that can tell them apart.
- Compare neural coding with wiring, by combining cellular-resolution activity imaging during behavior with serial-section electron microscopy of the same neurons in the hippocampus and neocortex.
- Maintain and upgrade two-photon, three-photon, mesoscope, widefield, and combined optogenetic-imaging microscopes integrated with mouse virtual-reality behavior setups.
More about the research
The PI's two projects belong to a larger multi-lab collaboration on how interacting neurons and brain regions support these abilities. One project asks where these neural sequences come from and what they do. The other builds and maintains the optical instruments used to record and manipulate brain activity in mice performing tasks in virtual reality.
Why it matters
This is basic neuroscience. It aims to explain how the brain keeps track of time and evidence while it makes decisions, and which regions and wiring patterns are responsible. The standardized methods for imaging neural activity in mice performing tasks in virtual reality are intended to be shared widely, so other neuroscience labs could use them.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christopher D Harvey
Harvard University, MA·Neuroscience
Map effective connectivity among functionally identified neurons in the posterior parietal cortex during a virtual-reality navigation decision task, using cellular-resolution optogenetics to stimulate small groups of neurons and testing wiring motifs predicted by decision-making theories.
James Heys
University of Utah, UT·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test whether axons (nerve fibers) from the anterior cingulate cortex that end in the medial entorhinal cortex carry a clock-like signal of elapsed time, using large-scale optical imaging in mice performing virtual-reality timing tasks.
Noah John Cowan
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Neuroscience
Develop control-theory and machine-learning models to explain how and why animals switch between fast exploratory active sensing and slower goal-directed task control, based on internal estimates of sensory uncertainty.
The school
Princeton University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $559M a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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