(aka BCS Journal Club)

...

Spring Semester 2025-2026

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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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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22 August 201720 January 2026:   Organizational Meeting

29 August 2017:  David Smith

• Adam M. P. Miller, William Mau and David M. Smith. Ensemble coding of long-term spatial memories and future goal locations in the retrosplenial cortex.

• Note: This manuscript is a working draft, so please do not distribute it beyond the journal club. Also, don't get too hung up with the analysis methodology. I'll explain as needed.

5 September 2017:  Caitlyn Finton

• Ludwig M, Tobin VA, Callahan MF, Papadaki E, Becker A, Engelmann M, Leng G (2013).  Intranasal application of vasopressin fails to elicit changes in brain immediate-early gene expression, neural activity, and behavioural performance of rats.  Journal of Neuroendocrinology 25:655-667.

• I have been thinking a lot about intranasal oxytocin and vasopressin. This paper suggests that there is no change in brain activity or behavior from intranasal OT and VP, although other papers have found behavioral changes. 
• The following papers also were brought up during our (robust and interesting) discussion:
  • Bartz et al. 2011
  • Churchland and Winkielman 2012
  • Rilling et al. 2014
  • Guastella and Hickie 2016
  • Quintana et al. 2016 

12 September 2017:  Aubrey Kelly

• J. Goodson (2013). Deconstructing sociality, social evolution and relevant nonapeptide functions. Psychneuroendocrinology 38:465-478.
• This review, written by offspring of the Cornell Psych Department, stresses two important concepts relevant to all areas represented by attendees of the CNS journal club: 1) Careful consideration needs to be taken with how we define behavior, and 2) We must utilize a comparative approach in order to understand the evolution of behavior.

19 September 2017:  Khena Swallow

• S. Warren, E. Yacoub & G. Ghose (2014). Featural and temporal attention selectively enhance task-appropriate representations in human primary visual cortex. Nature Communications 5:5643.

• This paper highlights two basic points that are important for anyone who cares about how brains work. First, attention alters the behavior of neuronal populations. As a result, tasks can impact what is represented and measured. Second, what is represented by neuronal populations is influenced by expectations along multiple dimensions, including visual features, timing, and semantics (not just space).

• Optional additional reading: T. Çukur, S. Nishimoto, A. Huth & J. Gallant (2013). Attention during natural vision warps semantic representation across the human brain. Nature Neuroscience 16(6):763-770.

26 September 2017:  Angela Freeman

• M. Sadananda, M. Woehr, R. Schwarting (2008).  Playback of 22-kHz and 50-kHz ultrasonic vocalizations induces differential c-fos expression in rat brain. Neuroscience Letters. 435:17-23.

• I picked my paper because it is one of very few that looks at the neural basis of rodent vocalizations. And I'm all about communication, and I did a similar study on ground squirrel communication, which I am presenting at SFN this year, so I wanted to discuss this paper to prep for what things might be good to address in my own work.

3 October 2017:  Jesse Werth

• B. Lasztoczi and T. Klausberger (2016). Hippocampal Place Cells Couple to Three Different Gamma Oscillations during Place Field Traversal. Neuron 91:34-40.

• Article discusses ideas central to neuronal information processing in a relatively well known brain network. We typically think of hippocampal place cells in the context of how much they fire (spike rates; e.g., with respect to place fields and the animal's physical location within an environment).  The authors of this article offer an expanded framework that stresses the importance of when these cells fire (think small time-scales, spike-timing), rather than how much.
• A paper that came up during discussion:  Using a new approach for identifying temporal structure in neuroimaging data, Baldassano et al. (2017) propose a theory of how continuous experience is divided into events that are represented in high-level cortex, are stored in long-term memory, and influence later perception.  Khena notes:  "There's a lot of interesting stuff in here, but I also find aspects of it to be pretty confusing or just wrong (if I understand them correctly)."

10 October 2017:  Fall Break - No meeting

17 October 2017:  Samantha Carouso

• K. Lynch, A. Gaglio, E. Tyler, J. Coculo, M. Louder and M. Hauber (2017). A neural basis for password-based species recognition in an avian brood parasite. Journal of Experimental Biology 220:2345-2353.

• This paper can serve as a starting point for a discussion of species recognition mechanisms in general, brood parasitism behavior, vocal learning and call production and their related auditory and production brain regions, ZENK as a scientific tool, innate vs. learned behaviors (and the potential false dichotomy of that distinction), and in vivo/in ovo learning.

24 October 2017:  George Prounis

• M. Stephenson-Jones, K. Yu, S. Ahrens, J. Tucciarone, A. van Huijstee, L. Mejia, M. Penzo, L. Tai, L. Wilbrecht & B. Li (2016). A basal ganglia circuit for evaluating action outcomes. Nature 539:289-293.

Additional recommended reading:

• L. Tai, A. M. Lee, N. Benavidez, A. Bonc, L. Wilbrecht (2012). Transient stimulation of distinct subpopulations of striatal neurons mimics changes in action value. Nature Neuroscience 15(9):1281-1289.

• These papers highlight the dynamic role of basal ganglia dopamine systems in decision-making and action evaluation in mice. The authors bi-directionally influence reward-based decisions via optogenetic manipulation of specific neuronal populations within the basal ganglia. Overall, these papers demonstrate the 1) the importance of dopamine in both evaluation and action, and 2) the explanatory power of linking precise, sub-circuit neural manipulations to simple behavioral tasks. My research interests include developmental changes in decision-making circuits, particularly the involvement of dopamine systems during adolescent risk-taking behavior.

31 October 2017:  Adam Broitman

• A. Broitman, M. Kahana and M. Healey (submitted).  Modeling Retest Effects in a Longitudinal Measurement Burst Design Study of Episodic Memory.

• This paper proposes a mathematical model with which to separate age-related memory changes from task-specific retest effects in a longitudinal study. This paper may be useful to anyone who conducts long-term human cognition studies, and I will discuss its potential application to my future work. 

7 November 2017:  David Katz

14 November 2017:  Society for Neuroscience - No meeting

21 November 2017:  Norma Hernandez

28 November 2017:  Wen-Yi Wu

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!