Jean-Paul Noel
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience·Early-career
To find our way around, the brain must work out where things are in the world and also where "I" am. When signals are ambiguous, this is hard.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
systems neuroscience
spatial navigation
path integration
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2027
What they work on
- Develop a rodent virtual-reality task in which animals use optic flow to path integrate to a hidden target, then must separate self-motion from target-motion.
- Test whether rodents' navigation errors follow Bayesian Causal Inference, appearing for small but not large signal disparities.
- Map neural activity across the rodent brain during causal inference using large-scale neurophysiology to link hippocampal spatial codes with cortex.
- Manipulate rodents' subjective sense of self-location with multisensory illusions and measure the change with the navigation task.
More about the research
For example, when the visual scene moves, is it because you moved or because something else did? Researchers have identified spatial maps in the brain, such as place cells and grid cells. Still, it remains unclear how the brain handles navigation in complex natural settings, and how these maps work with the cortex, the brain's outer layer. It is also unclear how the brain builds the sense of self-location that navigation starts from.
Why it matters
Understanding how the brain separates self-caused from external signals while navigating could clarify what goes wrong in disorders of inference, such as autism and schizophrenia. In the long term, this understanding could inform next-generation therapies for these conditions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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.
Gregory Deangelis
University of Rochester, NY·Neuroscience
Test a theory predicting that people's perception of object motion and depth during pursuit eye movements is biased by viewing geometry, using human psychophysics while keeping the object's motion on the retina fixed.
Jay Gottfried
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Test whether healthy volunteers can learn the spatial positions of a set of odors in a virtual reality arena where odors are the only informative cues, and whether grid-like fMRI brain responses arise during odor navigation.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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