How do you choose a restaurant for date night? The food obviously needs to be good, but the place shouldn’t be too far, especially if there is heavy traffic in the evening. Such decisions are cognitively challenging because for each possible option, you are likely estimating the distance, considering road conditions, and trying to gauge how the food was during your previous visits. After all that, these properties need to be traded off and compared so that a final decision can be made.
We (and other animals) make several such decisions every day – some are spatial, and others are more abstract (like choosing an appropriate teammate for a project). But how are such complex decisions made? How does the brain infer properties like distance or overall route difficulty and then trade them off with a hedonistic feature like the quality or quantity of food available? Does a particular brain region harbor a giant map that stores all the relevant information, or are the different types of information stored in different parts of the brain only to be ‘bound’ together during decision-making?
Our lab focuses on these questions using rats as the model system. As rats perform complex spatial decision-making tasks, we simultaneously record the activities of several hundred neurons from various brain regions using custom-made recording devices. Next, we employ a range of high-dimensional data analysis techniques to visualize and decode the information communicated by the recorded ensembles of neurons and correlate them with the behavior of the animal. Finally, we use a range of perturbation techniques (like opto- and chemogenetic techniques) to derive a causal link between the recorded neural activity and the animal’s behavior.
Overall, we are a highly interdisciplinary lab, employing a wide range of state-of-the-art experimental and analytical techniques to decipher the neural mechanisms of an unexplored cognitive phenomenon that is highly prevalent across species.
