Publications by authors named "Erin Neyhart"
Article Synopsis
- Acetylcholine (ACh) is important for quick brain-state changes during wakefulness, but how it behaves spatially and temporally during these changes is not fully understood.
- Researchers used advanced imaging techniques to study the relationship between ACh release and behavior, finding a strong connection between ACh activity and movements like locomotion and pupil dilation.
- By analyzing ACh sensor data, the study showed that ACh levels drop with increased distance from axons and created a model to predict ACh changes based on pupil size and running speed, enhancing our understanding of ACh dynamics during rapid brain transitions.
Even under spontaneous conditions and in the absence of changing environmental demands, awake animals alternate between increased or decreased periods of alertness. These changes in brain state can occur rapidly, on a timescale of seconds, and neuromodulators such as acetylcholine (ACh) are thought to play an important role in driving these spontaneous state transitions. Here, we perform the first simultaneous imaging of ACh sensors and GCaMP-expressing axons , to examine the spatiotemporal properties of cortical ACh activity and release during spontaneous changes in behavioral state.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo take the best actions, we often need to maintain and update beliefs about variables that cannot be directly observed. To understand the principles underlying such belief updates, we need tools to uncover subjects' belief dynamics from natural behavior. We tested whether eye movements could be used to infer subjects' beliefs about latent variables using a naturalistic navigation task.
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