Spring Semester

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2025-

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2026

For Fall and Spring Semesters 2015-2016, the Behavioral, Computational, and Systems Neuroscience (BCS) Journal Club will meet The Cognition and Neural Systems (CNS) Journal Club (nee' BCS Journal Club), also known as PSYCH 6271-101, meets 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 Spring 2015 semester's theme is  “Social Stimuli and Neural Representations”.  This is intentionally broad because we want presenters to bring many different perspectives to the BCS journal club.  Here are some examples of what we have in mind:

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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 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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23 August 201620 January 2026:   Organizational Meeting

27 January 2026:  NO MEETING

3 February 202630 August 2016:  David Smith and Alex Ophir

• Tavares, R., Mendelsohn, A., Grossman, Y., Williams, C., Shapiro, M., Trope, Y., and Schiller, D. (2015). A Map for Social Navigation in the Human Brain. Neuron 87:231-43.

6 September 2016:  David Smith and Alex Ophir

• G. Alexander, S. Farris, J. Pirone, C. Zheng, L. Colgin & S. Dudek (2015). Social and novel contexts modify hippocampal CA2 representations of space. Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038.

13 September 2016:  Marissa Rice and Alex Ophir

• F. Hitti & S. Siegelbaum. (2014). The hippocampal CA2 region is essential for social memory. Nature 508:88-94.

• A. Smith, S. Williams Avram, A. Cymerblit-Sabba, J. Song and W. Young (2016). Targeted activation of the hippocampal CA2 area strongly enhances social memory. Molecular Psychiatry 21:1137-1144.

Additional (optional) reading:

• L. Zynyuk, J. Huxter R. Muller and S. Fox. (2012). The Presence of a Second Rat Has Only Subtle Effects on the Location-Specific Firing of Hippocampal Place Cells. Hippocampus 22:1405–1416.

20 September 2016: No meeting this week

• No readings

27 September 2016:  David Smith and Alex Ophir (Retrosplenial Cortex as a possible target of investigation for social-spatial coding)

• Immordino-Yang M, McColl A, Damasio H, Damasio A. (2009). Neural correlates of admiration and compassion. PNAS 106(19):8021-6.

Additional background for those interested (we'll discuss these in class).

• Vedder, L. C., Miller, A. M. P., Harrison, M. B., and Smith, D. M. (2016). Retrosplenial Cortical Neurons Encode Navigational Cues, Trajectories and Reward Locations During Goal Directed Navigation. Cerebral Cortex, DOI 10.1093/cercor/bwh192.
• Phelps SM & Ophir AG (2009). Monogamous brains and alternative tactics: Neuronal V1aR, space use and sexual infidelity among male prairie voles. In Cognitive ecology: The evolutionary ecology of information processing and decision making. 2nd Ed. (eds: Dukas R. & Ratcliffe J.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

4 October 2016: David Smith and Alex Ophir (A primer on the dorsal and ventral hippocampus)

• B. Poucet, C. Thinus-Blanc, and R. Muller (1994). Place cells in the ventral hippocampus of rats. Neuroreport 5, 2045-2048.

• M. Fanselow and H. Dong (2010). Are the Dorsal and Ventral Hippocampus Functionally Distinct Structures? Neuron 65:7-19.
• B. Strange, M. Witter, E. Lein and E. Moser (2014). Functional organization of the hippocampal longitudinal axis. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15:655-669.

11 October 2016:  Fall Break - no journal club

18 October 2016: David Smith and Alex Ophir (Ventral hippocampus as a possible target of investigation for social-spatial coding)

• A. Felix-Ortiz and K. Tye (2014). Amygdala Inputs to the Ventral Hippocampus Bidirectionally Modulate Social Behavior. J. Neuroscience 34(2):586 –595.

Additional review as background for those interested.

• S. Allsop, C. VanderWeele, R. Wichmann and K.Tye (2014). Optogenetic insights on the relationship between anxiety-related behaviors and social deficits. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, vol 8, Article 241.

25 October 2016:  David Smith and Alex Ophir (Ventral hippocampus as a possible target of investigation for social-spatial coding, continued)

• T. Okuyama, T. Kitamura, D. Roy, S. Itohara and S. Tonegawa (2016). Ventral CA1 neurons store social memory. Science 353(6307):1536-41.

1 November 2016:  Jesse Werth

• Jesse will discuss the ideas in of his recently submitted NSF fellowship proposal.

Suggested background reading:

• S. Shea, L. Katz and R. Mooney (2008). Noradrenergic Induction of Odor-Specific Neural Habituation and Olfactory Memories. Journal of Neuroscience 28(42):10711–10719.

8 November 2016: Adam Miller

• Adam will discuss his recently completed work on the retrosplenial cortex, spatial memory and the simulation of future goals.

15 November 2016:  SFN Meeting - no journal club

22 November 2016:  Cancelled - no meeting this week.

29 November 2016:  Article potluck

• Bring your favorite, oddest, or most compelling recent finding or article to share with the group.

• 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!