Accelerating the pace of innovation in robotics by fostering diversity and inclusive leadership.

Diverse and inclusive teams are not merely a moral imperative but also a catalyst for scientific excellence in robotics. Drawing from literature, a comprehensive citation analysis, and expert interviews, we derive seven main benefits of diversity and inclusion and propose a leadership guide for roboticists to reap these benefits.

The caudal prethalamus: Inhibitory switchboard for behavioral control?

Prethalamic nuclei in the mammalian brain include the zona incerta, the ventral lateral geniculate nucleus, and the intergeniculate leaflet, which provide long-range inhibition to many targets in the midbrain, hindbrain, and thalamus. These nuclei in the caudal prethalamus can integrate sensory and non-sensory information, and together they exert powerful inhibitory control over a wide range of brain functions and behaviors that encompass most aspects of the behavioral repertoire of mammals, including sleep, circadian rhythms, feeding, drinking, predator avoidance, and exploration. In this perspective, we highlight the evidence for this wide-ranging control and lay out the hypothesis that one role of caudal prethalamic nuclei may be that of a behavioral switchboard that-depending on the sensory input, the behavioral context, and the state of the animal-can promote a behavioral strategy and suppress alternative, competing behaviors by modulating inhibitory drive onto diverse target areas.

Flexible inhibitory control of visually evoked defensive behavior by the ventral lateral geniculate nucleus.

Animals can choose to act upon, or to ignore, sensory stimuli, depending on circumstance and prior knowledge. This flexibility is thought to depend on neural inhibition, through suppression of inappropriate and disinhibition of appropriate actions. Here, we identified the ventral lateral geniculate nucleus (vLGN), an inhibitory prethalamic area, as a critical node for control of visually evoked defensive responses in mice.

Retinal Inputs to the Thalamus Are Selectively Gated by Arousal.

The brain can flexibly filter out sensory information in a manner that depends on behavioral state. In the visual thalamus and cortex, arousal and locomotion are associated with changes in the magnitude of responses to visual stimuli. Here, we asked whether such modulation of visual responses might already occur at an earlier stage in this visual pathway.

Parvalbumin-Interneuron Output Synapses Show Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity that Contributes to Auditory Map Remodeling.

Parvalbumin (PV)-expressing interneurons mediate fast inhibition of principal neurons in many brain areas; however, long-term plasticity at PV-interneuron output synapses has been less well studied. In the auditory cortex, thalamic inputs drive reliably timed action potentials (APs) in principal neurons and PV-interneurons. Using paired recordings in the input layer of the mouse auditory cortex, we found a marked spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) at PV-interneuron output synapses.

A Fine-Scale Functional Logic to Convergence from Retina to Thalamus.

Numerous well-defined classes of retinal ganglion cells innervate the thalamus to guide image-forming vision, yet the rules governing their convergence and divergence remain unknown. Using two-photon calcium imaging in awake mouse thalamus, we observed a functional arrangement of retinal ganglion cell axonal boutons in which coarse-scale retinotopic ordering gives way to fine-scale organization based on shared preferences for other visual features. Specifically, at the ∼6 μm scale, clusters of boutons from different axons often showed similar preferences for either one or multiple features, including axis and direction of motion, spatial frequency, and changes in luminance.