Publications

Just as genomes revolutionized molecular genetics, connectomes (maps of neurons and synapses) are transforming neuroscience. To date, the only species with complete connectomes are worms and sea squirts (10³-10⁴ synapses). By contrast, the fruit fly is...

To pursue a moving visual object, the brain must continuously steer the object to the center of the visual field via feedback. The gain of this control loop is flexible, yet the biological mechanisms underlying such adaptive control are not well...

Navigation requires us to take account of multiple spatial cues with varying levels of informativeness and learn their spatial relationships. Here we investigate this process in the Drosophila head direction system, which functions as a ring attractor and...

Body movement often evokes strong changes in neural activity in visual brain regions. Some of this movement-related activity is locked to locomotion, while other activity is locked to the movements of particular body parts. Visual brain regions are...

To navigate, we must continuously estimate the direction we are headed in, and we must correct deviations from our goal¹. Direction estimation is accomplished by ring attractor networks in the head direction system^2,3. However, we do not fully understand...

Body movement often evokes strong changes in neural activity in visual brain regions. Some of this movement-related activity is locked to locomotion, while other activity is locked to the movements of particular body parts. Visual brain regions are...

Many animals can navigate toward a goal they cannot see based on an internal representation of that goal in the brain's spatial maps. These maps are organized around networks with stable fixed-point dynamics (attractors), anchored to landmarks, and...

Gain control is a process that adjusts a system’s sensitivity when input levels change. Neural systems contain multiple mechanisms of gain control, but we do not understand why so many mechanisms are needed or how they interact. Here, we investigate these...