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Spring Semester
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2025-
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2026
The Cognition and Neural Systems (CNS) Journal Club (nee' BCS Journal Club), also known as PSYCH 6271-101, meets For Spring Semester 2013-2014, the Behavioral, Computational, and Systems Neuroscience (BCS) Journal Club will meet on Tuesdays from 11:45 40 to 1:00 15 pm in 205 Uris Hall 205 (across from the elevators).
Your hosts are David Smith and Thomas Cleland.
Papers and notes from previous semesters can be found in the CNS (BCS) meeting archive.
The semester's theme is Attention, from both a neurobiological and cognitive perspective. The goal, of course, is to cross-reference and cross-challenge the two so as to come up with an integrative and useful understanding of the field. How can human attentional tasks best be studied using animal models? What, if any, is the special importance of cholinergic neuromodulation to attention? Is "attention" still a useful concept? As always, please interpret BCS themes broadly -- they are meant to focus rather than to exclude.
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BCS will continue its "minimal Powerpoint" policy, in place since Fall 2011. In order to make discussions more engaging and less formal, we encourage presentations to be primarily "chalk talks", in which concepts are sketched rather than figures shown. Mixed media are OK too, in which a complex figure can be put onto a slide or simply zoomed up on from the PDF file of the original paper, but drawing the figure tends to convey stronger understanding than does flashing a figure up on the wall. We also emphasize that you do not have to present papers in their entirety, much less multiple papers. Having everybody read up thoroughly on something small and focused usually makes for a better experience than everybody skimming one or more full papers. You may want to present only one exciting concept, exemplified by one or more figures drawn from one or more papers. That's great. Focus on the concepts, and don't feel compelled to master every detail of every paper that you want to include in your presentation. Do what you feel is best, but please do not just put the figures of a paper into a slide show and describe the paper.
Shortlink to this page: https://cornellneuro.science/cnsjournalclub
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Presentations in the CNS JC are intended to "show us what you are interested in"; i.e., present work within your subfield that illustrates why it is interesting and broadly applicable. It is less important to choose papers that you think will be close to every attendees' heart than it is to choose papers that are blisteringly important or interesting or controversial in your own subfield, and explain/share this with the group. It's good for all of us. The corollary is that journal club members attend regularly, and don't decide whether to attend in a given week based on what is being presented.
Presenting That said, presenting your own work is always welcome, and in this case often it will be in Powerpoint format and formally organized. Not a problem. in whatever manner you like.
To add yourself to the BCS-L mailing list, send a plain-text email to bcs-L-request@cornell.edu with the body of the message saying simply join. The subject line doesn't matter. Sending the message leave instead will unsubscribe you from the list. See Cornell's Lyris HowTo page for further details. journal club mailing list (BCS-L@lists.cornell.edu), or remove yourself from it, follow the instructions at https://it.cornell.edu/simplelists/manage-subscriptions.
You can enroll in the BCS CNS Journal Club for graduate or undergraduate credit credit (1 -2 CR, S/U) as a a Topics in Biopsychology seminar: PSYCH 6271-101. The course requires that you present at least once during the semester and participate actively overall. You are welcome to attend without enrolling, of course, but we do appreciate you graduate students enrolling if you plan to attend the whole semester and to present.
Please contact Thomas Cleland or or David Smith with with any questions.
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20 January 2026: Organizational Meeting
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27 January 2026: NO MEETING
3 February 2026: David Smith
- M. Zipple, B. Loflin, D. Chang Kuo, E. Tan and M. Sheehan (2025). Transfer to a naturalistic setting restructures fear responses in laboratory mice. Curr Bio 35:1157-76.
10 February 2026: NO MEETING
- Instead, please attend Micaela Rodriguez' "Human Bonding" lecture, 11:00 - 12:30, in G90 Uris Hall. (Dr. Rodriguez is a candidate for a faculty position in Psychology).
17 February 2026: FEBRUARY BREAK - NO MEETING
24 February 2026: Lindsay Sailer
- Nardou R, Sawyer E, et al (2023). Psychedelics reopen the social reward learning critical period. Nature 618: 790–798.
- Lindsay has generously shared her slide deck, with background info and related context.
3 March 2026: James Cunningham
- Asumbisa K, Peyrache A, Trenholm S (2025). Stereo olfaction underlies stable coding of head direction in blind mice. Nature Communications 16:3545.
10 March 2026: Patryk Ziobro
- Original research presentation (!)
17 March 2026: David Zheng
- Jung J, You I-J, Shin S (2025). Thalamo-hippocampal pathway determines aggression and self-harm. Science Advances 11: eady5540.
24 March 2026: Cynthia Wu
- Wolf D, Oettle L-L, Sanchez-Guardado L, Linster C, Lois C, Kelsch W (2026). Deletion of NPAS4 in olfactory bulb principal neurons alters E/I balance and impairs decoding of chemically similar odor molecules. Journal of Physiology 604.1: 527-547.
- Cynthia will also show some of her own work, some of which relates to the immediate-early gene Npas4. Some related papers:
- A preprint presenting "X-TRAP" transgenic mice ... essentially a double FosTRAP strain using two different inducers of Fos-gated fluorophore expression.
- The original paper introducing the Xon method, used as the second "TRAP"-like method in the "X-TRAP" paper.
31 March 2026: SPRING BREAK - NO MEETING
7 April 2026: TBD
14 April 2026: Wangchen Pei
- Perez EC, Elie JE, Soulage CO, Soula HA, Mathevon N, Vignal C (2012). The acoustic expression of stress in a songbird: Does corticosterone drive isolation-induced modifications of zebra finch calls? Hormones and Behavior 61: 573-581.
- For additional background reading of potential interest, there is this review:
- MacDougall-Shackleton SA, Spencer KA (2012). Developmental stress and birdsong: current evidence and future directions. Journal of Ornithology 153 (Suppl): S105-S117.
21 April 2026: No meeting
28 April 2026: No meeting
5 May 2026: Shiping Li
- J. Zhao, B. An, N. Cheng, Q. Dong, C. Wang, X. Chen (2025). Gravity-dependent choice of frame of reference in the posterior parietal cortex. Current Biology 35, 4882–4897.
See you in the fall!
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10 September 2013: Khena Swallow (Introductory readings on attention)
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- Desimone and Duncan (1995). Neural mechanisms of selective visual attention. This review is still the canonical theoretical framework for visual attention in neuroscience. We are likely to refer back to it repeatedly over the course of the semester as we read and discuss other papers.
- Chapter 1 from Harold Pashler's book The Psychology of Attention (1998). A classic from the cognitive science perspective. Particularly notable is the author's position that the term "attention" is poorly defined and no longer useful.
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17 September 2013: Dave Bulkin
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- TBD
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24 September 2013: Adam Miller
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- TBD
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1 October 2013 (Thom may be absent): Lindsey Vedder
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- TBD
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8 October 2013: Pedro Rittner
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- TBD
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15 October 2013: FALL BREAK
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- No BCS meeting.
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22 October 2013: Phil Perrone
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- TBD
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29 October 2013: Guoshi Li
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- TBD
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5 November 2013: Rachel Swanson
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- TBD
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12 November 2013: Society for Neuroscience Meeting
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- No BCS meeting.
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19 November 2013: TBD
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- TBD
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26 November 2013: SiWei Luo
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- Readings TBD. Subject will be either the role of attention in flavor perception or how reward- or aversive associations guide attention.
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3 December 2013: TBD
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