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 Fall Semester 2015-2016, 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.

Shortlink to this page:  https://cornellneuro.science/cnsjournalclub

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The Fall 2015 semester's theme is  “Learning within constraints”.  This is intentionally broad, in part because BCS itself has broadened this semester to include behavioral ecology approaches.  Here are some examples of what we have in mind:

• Learning is constrained, and therefore shaped in form and content, by preexisting memory.  How so?
• Learning is constrained by species-specific capacities and attunements, sensory or otherwise.  When is this important? 
• Learning is constrained by modality:  how is learning about space different from, or similar to, learning about nonspatial stimuli?  How is space encoded; how is this similar to and different from other types of information encoding?  This could be a proxy for hippocampus = place codes vs hippocampus = episodic memory wars. 
• Learning is strongly shaped by ‘educated guesses’ of whether a new stimulus is ‘the same’ as a previous stimulus or not:  the former is based on generalization and leads to the reinforcement learning literature; the latter instead leads one into literatures of competition and interference among conflicting but similar memories.  What do we know about this ongoing process, and is there something to be gained by combining and comparing the reinforcement learning literature with the interference literature?  This essentially statistical process is also the basis for mimicry and its advantages, especially regarding imperfect mimics.  

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.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 your own work is always welcome, 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 (1 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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25 August 201520 January 2026:   Organizational Meeting

• Barron et al., 2015.  Embracing multiple definitions of learning.  Trends in Neurosciences 38(7):405.
  • This short TINS paper reflects on different views of learning derived from different fields of study (neuroscience, psychology, behavioral ecology, machine learning).  

1 September 2015:  No meeting.

8 September 2015:  Adam Miller

• J. Alfei, R. Monti, V. Molina, A. Bueno and G. Urcelay. (2015). Prediction error and trace dominance determine the fate of fear memories after post-training manipulations. Learning and Memory 22:385-400.

15 September 2015:  David Smith

• Akers et al (2014). Hippocampal Neurogenesis Regulates Forgetting During Adulthood and Infancy.Science, 344:598-602.

Optional reading: This review article has some background material on neurognesis as it relates to the main paper.

• P. Frankland, S. Kohler and S. Josselyn (2014). Hippocampal neurogenesis and forgetting. Trends in Neurosciences. 36(9):497-503.

22 September 2015:  David Smith

• Retrosplenial Cortical Neurons Encode Important Navigational Cues - recent data from the Smith lab, no readings.

29 September 2015:  Marissa Rice

• M. Guigueno, D. Snow, S. MacDougall-Shackleton, D. Sherry (2014). Female cowbirds have more accurate spatial memory than males. Biology Letters 10.

6 October 2015:  Norma Hernandez

• TBD

13 October 2015:  Fall Break - no BCS

20 October 2015:  Society for Neuroscience meeting - no BCS

27 October 2015:  Aubrey Kelly

• TBD

10 November 2015: Khena Swallow

• TBD

17 November 2015:  Alex Ophir

• TBD

24 November 2015:  Lisa Hiura

• Khena out of town, possibly also Alex

1 December 2015:  TBD

• Khena out of town

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!