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 on Tuesdays from 11:40 to 1:15 pm in 205 Uris Hall (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.

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Presenting your own work is always welcome, in whatever manner you like.

To add yourself to the mailing list, send a plain-text email to bcs-L-request@cornell.edu  (BCS is the historical name of the journal club) with the subject line of the message saying simply join, and the body of the message blank/empty.  Sending the message with a subject line of 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 CNS Journal Club for credit (1 CR, S/U) as 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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21 20 January 20252026:   Preview session with interested undergrads

28 January 2025:  Organizational Meeting

4 February 2025:  James Cunningham

• Geng, C., Li, R., Li, S., Liu, P., Peng, Y., Liu, C., ... & Li, A. (2025). Noradrenergic inputs from the locus coeruleus to anterior piriform cortex and the olfactory bulb modulate olfactory outputs. Nature Communications, 16(1), 260.

Optional Background Reading:

• Ghosh, A., Massaeli, F., Power, K. D., Omoluabi, T., Torraville, S. E., Pritchett, J. B., ... & Yuan, Q. (2021). Locus coeruleus activation patterns differentially modulate odor discrimination learning and odor valence in rats. Cerebral Cortex Communications, 2(2), tgab026

11 February 2025:  Tim DeVoogd - Original research presentation

Optional Readings:

• Grant, P. & Grant, R. (2018). Evolution of Character Displacement in Darwin's Finches. Science 313:224-6.

• Moore, J. & DeVoogd, T. (2017). Concerted and Mosaic Evolution of Functional Modules in Songbird Brains. Proceedings of the Royal Society. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.0469.

18 February 2025:  FEBRUARY BREAK - NO MEETING

25 February 2025:  Lindsay Sailer

• Rea JJ, Liu CM, Hayes AMR, ..., Kanoski SE. (2025). Hippocampus oxytocin signaling promotes prosocial eating in rats. Biological Psychiatry 97(5), 540-549.

4 March 2025:  Wendy Yang

• S. Valerio & J. Taube (2012). Path integration: How the head direction signal maintains and corrects spatial orientation. Nature Neuroscience 15(10):1445-1453.

11 March 2025:  Cynthia Wu

• Martiros N, Kapoor V, Kim SE, Murthy VN (2022).  Distinct representation of cue-outcome association by D1 and D2 neurons in the ventral striatum's olfactory tubercle.  eLife 11:e75463.

18 March 2025:  Hetvi Doshi

• S. Chandra, S. Sharma, R. Chaudhuri & I. Fiete (2025). Episodic and associative memory from spatial scaffolds in the hippocampus. Nature 638:739–751

Optional (recommended) Background Reading: 

• R. Chaudhuri & I. Fiete (2016). Computational principles of memory. Nature Neuroscience 19:394–403.

25 March 2025:  Continuing discussion of the episodic and associative memory model from last week.

• Read the recommended reading from last week.
• After-the-fact reading of interest:  Huber DE (2025). A memory model of rodent spatial navigation: place cells are memories arranged in a grid and grid cells are non-spatial.  eLife (in press).  

1 April 2025:  SPRING BREAK - NO MEETING

8 April 2025:  Inbal Ravreby

• Hyon R, Youm Y, Kim J, Chey J, Kwak S, Parkinson C (2020).  Similarity in functional brain connectivity at rest predicts interpersonal closeness in the social network of an entire village.  PNAS 117(52):33149-33160.  
• Inbal also will discuss a related project that she currently is working on.  

15 April 2025:  TBD ... possibly pre-read and prime discussion of the two Finlay papers to be discussed at the Gibson seminar on Thursday 4/17?  

• TBD

22 April 2025:  TBD

• TBD

29 April 2025:  TBD

• TBD

6 May 2025:  TBD

Organizational Meeting

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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