New Horizons in Neuroscience Seminar - Hannah Payne | Thursday, February 15, 2024 at 9 am |

Speaker - Hannah Payne, Columbia University

Hosted by Neuroscience Search Committee

Food-caching birds, such as black-capped chickadees, store many food items across their environment and later retrieve them using hippocampus-dependent memory. Like primates, food-caching birds also depend heavily on vision to navigate. I will first describe our discovery of spatial representations in the avian hippocampus, suggesting a remarkable similarity in hippocampal circuit function between birds and mammals despite 300 million years of independent evolution. More recently, I have developed a system to estimate gaze in freely moving birds, allowing us to behaviorally dissociate physical location from viewed location. I will present results using this system, which suggest that the hippocampus dynamically coordinates representations of physical and viewed locations during active vision. Additionally, I will describe modulation of these codes by expectation related to future goals. These studies lay a foundation for future investigation of how mnemonic and perceptual circuits interact to guide behavior more broadly.