Biology subjects

Suzuki, W. A.

Publications and source records attributed to Suzuki, W. A..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2021

Making BrainWaves: Portable Brain Technologies in Biology Education

Neuroscience is one of the fastest growing STEM fields, yet its presence in K-12 science education is very limited, partially due to the lack of accessible teaching materials and tools. Here, we describe a new high school neuroscience curriculum ("BrainWaves"), where students utilize recent advances in low-cost, portable Electroencephalography (EEG) technology to investigate their own brain activity. This semester-long curriculum is supported by science mentors and an educational application that guides students through the process of recording and analyzing their own brain activity. Evaluation data collected in 5 public New York City schools in 2018/19 indicate significant positive shifts in content knowledge and self-efficacy among students who participated in BrainWaves compared to students in other courses of the same teacher. The quantitative findings are supported by interviews, where students reported increased appreciation for neuroscience and college readiness and discussed the benefits of collaborating with scientists and using portable brain technology in classrooms.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2020

Neural evidence of recognition--but not recall--for videos in monkey hippocampus

The role of the hippocampus in recognition memory has long been a source of debate. Tasks used to study recognition that typically require an explicit probe, where the participant must make a response to prove they remember, yield mixed results on hippocampal involvement. Here, we tasked monkeys to freely view naturalistic videos, and only tested their memory via looking times for two separate novel v. repeat video conditions on each trial. Notably, a large proportion of hippocampal neurons differentiated these videos via changes in firing rates time-locked to the duration of their presentation on screen, and not during the delay period between them as would be expected for working memory. Single neurons often contributed to both retrieval conditions, and did so across many trials with trial-unique video content, suggesting they detect familiarity. The majority of neurons contributing to the classifier showed an enhancement in firing rate on repeat compared to novel videos, a pattern which has not previously been shown in hippocampus. These results suggest the hippocampus contributes to recognition memory via familiarity during free-viewing. Significance StatementRecognition memory enables distinction of new from previously encountered stimuli. In the majority of recognition memory work, humans or animals are tasked to explicitly identify whether a stimulus is old or new. In some of these studies--but for unknown reasons not others--there is evidence of hippocampal involvement. Here, when we present trial-unique, naturalistic videos to monkeys, firing rates from many single hippocampal neurons surprisingly differentiate new from repeated videos. The ability of these hippocampal neurons to detect recently-viewed stimuli, despite the videos unfamiliar content, suggests they contribute to memory. These results are consistent with hippocampal involvement in the familiarity aspect of recognition memory during free-viewing.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Population coding of pattern separation in the monkey hippocampus

The CA3 and dentate gyrus (DG) regions of the hippocampus are considered key for disambiguating sensory inputs from similar experiences in memory, a process termed pattern separation. The neural mechanisms underlying pattern separation, however, have been difficult to compare across species: rodents offer robust recording methods with less human-centric tasks while humans provide complex behavior with less recording potential. To overcome these limitations, we trained monkeys to perform a visual pattern separation task similar to those used in humans while recording activity from single CA3/DG neurons. We find that when animals discriminate recently seen novel images from similar (lure) images, behavior indicative of pattern separation, CA3/DG neurons respond to lure images more like novel than repeat images. Using a population of these neurons, we are able to classify novel, lure, and repeat images from each other using this pattern of firing rates. Notably, one subpopulation of these neurons is more responsible for distinguishing lures and repeats--the key discrimination indicative of pattern separation.

neuroscience↗