Jean-Marc Fellous
University of California-San Diego, CA·Neuroscience
Finding your way through a large, cluttered space is something people do daily, and it is one of the first abilities to fail in Alzheimer's disease and in normal aging. Most laboratory studies of the brain's navigation system, however, use small arenas that barely resemble a city block or a shopping mall.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Computer Science
Engineering
- Topics
hippocampus
place cells
entorhinal cortex
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Mar 2028
What they work on
- Characterize whether ventral hippocampal place cells, whose firing zones are too broad to distinguish locations in small arenas, carry useful position information in very large environments, by recording dorsal and ventral hippocampus simultaneously in rats.
- Contrast place-cell coding during a low cognitive load foraging task and a high load multi-goal maze, using Space Syntax, a quantitative framework from architecture, to measure how complex each maze layout actually is.
- Sample hippocampal activity in rats with increasing training and experience from young adulthood through senescence, testing whether multi-field, multi-scale spatial encoding along the dorsal-ventral axis changes with age.
- Record neural activity wirelessly in rats solving Traveling Salesperson-style route problems inside 'megaspace' mazes, measuring how fixed landmarks and moving obstacles reshape route choice and navigational error.
- Construct a data-constrained biophysical model of hippocampal-entorhinal interaction that explains how self-motion and landmark information are combined, and test its predictions about neural representations of megaspaces experimentally.
More about the research
Two projects here record brain activity from rats exploring unusually large mazes: one asks how the brain's spatial map changes across the life span, the other turns those recordings into a computer model of navigation useful to both neuroscience and robotics.
Why it matters
Difficulty navigating large environments appears early in Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment and healthy aging. Mapping how the length of the hippocampus encodes big, complex spaces, and how that encoding shifts with age, could clarify where those deficits originate. The accompanying neural model may give robotics and autonomous-vehicle engineers better ways to anchor routes to landmarks and anticipate moving obstacles, and connects to other conditions marked by spatial processing problems, including ADHD, schizophrenia and depression.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Najib Majaj
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Compare neural computations and behavioral algorithms in macaques foraging head-free in a foraging room with those during head-fixed navigation in virtual reality, to test whether restrained lab conditions differ from naturalistic ones.
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.
Jean-Paul Noel
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience·Early-career
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.
The school
University of California-San Diego: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 637 research doctorates a year.
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