BI 243 Alison Barth: Learning as a Window to Cortex

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.

The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

Read more about our partnership.

Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released.

To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.

Alison Barth runs the Barth Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, where they use learning experiments in mice to try to figure out how the cortex works. As you may know, the brain in general but also the cortex itself is made up of a large variety neuron cell types, with different activity properties. Alison has the gritty job of identifying those different cell types in sensory cortex, and seeing how they change when animals learn to associate rewards with sensory stimulation. So unlike many of the guests, who take a much more zoomed out view and look at how populations of neurons carry out some function, Alison is happiest down at the cellular level. So we talk about her work, why she prefers to work at that scale, and a variety of related topics.

• Barth Lab.
• Related papers
  • Barth lab publications.
  • Learning, prediction accuracy, and neural plasticity in sensory cortex.

Read the transcript.

0:00 - Intro 4:24 - Alison's trajectory to learning and memory 21:02 - Automated mouse learning experiments 25:34 - What is success in this line of work? 32:34 - How many cell types do we need to explain? 34:33 - Current experiments 38:11 - How does cortex work? 45:19 - Predictive processing 1:02:01 - Obstacles 1:10:41 - Role of AI 1:33:38 - Moving forward