ESI Systems Neuroscience Conference 2024
Time in the brain: How does the brain encode and use time to make sense of and interact with the world?
General Information
We are pleased to announce that the Ernst Strüngmann Institute Systems Neuroscience Conference (ESI SyNC) 2024 will take place on September 26 and 27 at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute in Frankfurt, Germany.
This year’s topic is: Time in the brain: How does the brain encode and use time to make sense of and interact with the world? Ten experts will present their research, ranging from basic network interactions, probed at the single-neuron level, to population responses to behavior and its cognitive underpinnings.
This year’s ESI SyNC integrates different aspects of time in the brain, using approaches from neuroscience, biology, psychology and cognitive science. Specifically, the topics include timing as a computational primitive, the perception of time, temporal attention and expectancy, interval timing, rhythmic and multi-person timing. Neural timing mechanisms will be explored at cortical and sub-cortical levels in non-human animals, including rodents and non-human primates, and in humans.
Please note that this year, ESI SyNC will be an in-person only conference. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, raise questions and exchange ideas. We especially encourage young researchers to attend. There will be a poster session and we look forward to your abstract submissions! Program highlights include demonstrations of human musical timing by a highly accomplished professional drummer and bass player. There will be an on-site dinner on the first evening.
Conference Schedule
Dean Buonomano
University of California, Los Angeles, USATiming as a computational primitive of neocortical circuits
Dean Buonomano is a professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Psychology at UCLA. He is a computational and experimental neuroscientist whose lab studies how the brain tells and represents time, neural dynamics, and learning in neocortical circuits. He is the author of Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time.
Megan Carey
Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, Lison, PRTCerebellar mechanisms for learned timing revealed by locomotor learning in mice
The cerebellum is critical for keeping movements coordinated across the body in both space and time. In particular, cerebellum-dependent learned behaviors are characterized by remarkable temporal precision. Dr. Megan Carey has studied locomotor learning on a split-belt treadmill in mice, and found that the spatial and temporal components of learning are dissociable on the circuit level. She will present these findings and their implications for the neural basis of temporal processing.
Matthias Grabenhorst
Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI), Frankfurt, GERProbability computation in temporal prediction
In everyday life, people predict whether and when future events will occur which allows for action preparation, fast responses, and informed decisions. Dr. Grabenhorst investigates how the human brain estimates and represents probability over time - a key variable in temporal prediction and time-based decision making.
Andrea Ravignani
Dept. of Human Neurosciences, Sapienza University of Rome, ITThe origins of rhythm: From animal behaviour to human music
Who's got rhythm? Why do humans typically do, several other animals don't, and some species even exceed our capacities? How did our sense of rhythm evolve in our lineage? Prof. Andrea Ravignanis uses methods and theoretical frameworks from mathematical biology, ethology, speech sciences, music psychology, informatics and cognitive neuroscience to understand what makes humans 'rhythmic animals'.
Caroline Palmer
McGill University, Montreal, CAMusical dynamics: Individual and multi-person timing
From cradle to grave, people across the world's societies use music to soothe, to invigorate, to bond with others, and even to self-medicate. Prof. Palmer’s research program focuses on how and why music moves us by modeling how people make music in groups. She compares human- and human-computer groups to test computational mechanisms that support our social ability to make music.
Hugo Merchant
Institute of Neurobiology / UNAM, Juriquilla, Querétaro, MEXNeurophysiology of rhythmic timing in primates
Prof. Merchant's laboratory has been investigating the neural underpinnings of interval timing in corticothalamic-basal ganglia circuit for several years. It has adopted a comparative approach between humans and non-human primates to understand the behavioral, structural, and neurophysiological principles behind perceiving, predicting, and driving behavior using single or rhythmically-timing events in a wide variety of paradigms. The lab uses state-of-the-art experimental tools, including multiarea high-density extracellular recordings in behaving monkeys, comparative psychophysics, EEG recordings in humans and macaques, and high resolution structural and tractography magnetic resonance in both species of primates.
Joe Paton
Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, Lisbon, PRTHierarchy and heterarchy of circuit mechanisms for behavioral control
The brain, broadly speaking, is for control. 600 million years of evolution has endowed nervous systems with a multitude of mechanisms for achieving that control. In vertebrates, mechanisms in the spinal cord and hindbrain are responsible for more automatized forms of control: reflex circuits, central pattern generators, and circuits for movement primitives. These processes can be selected amongst, modulated, and chained together by the descending influence of brain systems positioned more rostrally that possess a rich capacity to learn from experience. It is these more adaptive systems that Dr. Paton's laboratory is most interested in understanding. And yet, control by these systems appears to be fundamentally both heterarchical, requiring distinct computations performed by specific brain systems, and hierarchical, with each system operating at varying degrees of abstraction in relation to the immediate physical world. In this talk, Dr. Paton will describe how experiments in his laboratory focused on understanding how neural circuits are provided a temporal basis computation have revealed not only fundamental principles underlying temporal processing, but also signatures of how hierarchies of representations can interact to produce robust policies for behavior, and how distinct aspects of behavioral control appear to be handled by different brain systems.
Ayelet Landau
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, ISRUniversal rhythmic architecture uncovers distinct modes of neural dynamics
Prof. Ayelet Landau's research focuses on temporality in the brain and in cognition. Her research seeks to shed light on the cognitive and functional consequences of brain-wide neuronal architecture. Previously, she had investigated how brain rhythms shape perceptual and behavioral performance. Her talk at ESI SyNC will survey a line of work investigating temporal decisions and offer new insights on the core mechanisms and models serving time perception.
The Denison Lab studies visual perception, attention, and decision making, with a focus on temporal dynamics. Our research integrates behavioral measurements (psychophysics, eye tracking), neural measurements (fMRI, EEG/MEG), and computational modeling to investigate how perception and attention unfold in time.
Tadeusz Kononowicz
Paris-Saclay Institute of Neuroscience (Neuro PSI) & CNRS Université Paris-Saclay, Paris, FRKnow thyself: Interval timing and its self-monitoring in rats and humans
Dr. Tadeusz Kononowicz explores internal representations of duration, timing uncertainty, and the relationship between timing and metacognition across species. In recent years, he initiated investigations of the brain's ability to judge its temporal errors in generated time intervals. Dr. Kononowicz employs a range of methodologies in his work, including computational approaches, non-invasive recordings (EEG and MEG), stimulation methods (transcranial current stimulation) in, as well as in-vivo recordings (spike, LFP), and causal methods (pharmacological injection) in rats.
Valérie Doyère
Paris-Saclay Institute of Neuroscience (Neuro PSI) & CNRS Université Paris-Saclay, Paris, FRThe amygdala as a network player in temporal expectancy of a reinforcer
Dr. Valérie Doyère's research is oriented towards understanding the neural networks and the mechanisms underlying the formation and updating of associative memory, with a special focus on the temporal component which controls the anticipatory aspect of behavior and is fundamental for error detection and learning. Using complementary methodologies (behavior, electropysiology, molecular techniques) in rats, she focuses on a large interconnected network formed by the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex and the striatum which may constitute a functional connectome at the service of integrative functions, such as memory and timing.
All times are given in local, central European summer time (CEST) / GMT+2 / UCT+2.
Registration & Fees
Registration is now closed. Conference attendance is free for students and scientific staff. Postdocs and PIs are asked to pay a registration fee of 100€ using the bank details provided after registration. Postdocs and PIs who opt to present a poster are exempt from paying the registration fee. Please note that the conference will be catered for. Please consider our privacy notice regarding events.
Contact
You can contact the organizing committee with any queries regarding the conference by sending an email to: esi-sync (at) esi-frankfurt.de or to the individual organizers.
Organizing Committee
Berfin Bastug | Nisa Cuevas | Giuliana Giorjiani | Matthias Grabenhorst | David Poeppel | Wolf Singer | Cordula Ullah | Renata Vajda
Past events
To ease the wait until our next Systems Neuroscience conference, we recommend taking a look at the talks from the last three ESI SyNCs on our ESI YouTube channel:
► ESI SyNC 2023 - Linking hypotheses: where neuroscience, computation, and cognition meet ► ESI SyNC 2022 - The ever changing brain: through development and evolution ► ESI SyNC 2021 - The Natural Brain: understanding neuronal computation in its natural habitat