Christos Constantinidis
@cconstan
Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience. Neural basis of cognition, cognitive development, deep brain stimulation.
For those who may be wondering: Google Gemini is still not conscious.
Decoding of task variables again showed variability and task-specific patterns: improved spatial match-nonmatch task decoding, little change in object match-nonmatch task decoding, and disappearance of a saccade bias in the object choose-match task. (9/10)
Firing rate analysis recapitulated the human studies. There was no consistent change with training beyond a slight trend of increase in baseline; instead, it moved in different directions by task. A significant decrease was present during the choice epoch across tasks (6/10)
We introduce a behavioral metric of progress in task acquisition we term "Drop in Performance" (DIP) at trial reversals. As subjects learned the stimulus-reward rule, DIP magnitude decreased significantly across all subjects and tasks. (4/10)
Great, continuous submission for NIH applications is over ===
Incredibly honored to be named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This distinction recognizes the work of my students and trainees over the years. Congratulations to the other Vanderbilt faculty elected AAAS Fellows as well.
Very happy to announce that my student Zhengyang Wang successfully defended his dissertation, today. Congratulations Dr. Wang!
When we calculated decoding accuracy of populations of neurons sampled from different trials (or “pseudo-populations”, commonly used in neurophysiology) and tested them with neurons recorded simultaneously, only a subtle performance decrease was evident (12/10)
However, we also show that such off-states are relative decreases in firing rate rather than absolute “gaps” in spiking. Activity across the network continued to maintain information about the stimulus being remembered even during off states (11/10)
In this article we document “The Asynchronous State” of Working Memory. In single trials, individual neurons may not exhibit persistent activity, however populations of ~100 neurons are sufficient to generate activity elevated above the baseline for the entire delay period (8/10)
Vanderbilt is not rejecting the Compact on higher education.
Study section would have wrapped up this week. No idea when it will restart after the government shutdown.
We have already been using it in human and animal experiments! (7/10)
Christos lab, summer 2025 edition. Wonderful group to work with.
DALLE's effort for a Happy-2025-banner for our lab. Happy New Year everybody!
I have a theory of why Trump wants to buy Greenland. It's the accursed Mercator projection! In most maps Greenland appears much larger than the US and the same size as the entire continent of Africa. In reality, it is about the size of Algeria. I predict Trump would lose interest if he found out.