Noah John Cowan
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Neuroscience
How does the brain combine what the senses report with its own internal picture of the world to control movement and navigation? Answering this question matters for everyday actions such as walking and reaching, and for memory.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
active sensing
motor control
sensory uncertainty
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2030
What they work on
- Develop control-theory and machine-learning models to explain how and why animals switch between fast exploratory active sensing and slower goal-directed task control, based on internal estimates of sensory uncertainty.
- Run high-throughput refuge-tracking experiments in weakly electric fish to measure how the strength and noticeability of sensory signals affect mode switching and control strategy.
- Record brain activity in weakly electric fish to identify neural signals linked to locomotor control policies and to switching between sensing and task modes.
- Investigate the neural mechanisms and behavioral effects of path integration gain recalibration, in which landmarks retune how movement updates a rat's internal map, by recording hippocampal place cells in virtual reality.
- Identify the error signals that mediate interactions between visual landmarks and path integration in the hippocampus and related regions, using control-systems analysis and attractor network models.
More about the research
These processes break down in conditions such as stroke and Alzheimer's disease. The lab applies control theory, the engineering mathematics of feedback systems, to animal behavior and neural recordings. It works in two animal systems: weakly electric fish and rats.
Why it matters
Aging, stroke and diabetes can impair the sensory feedback people need for walking, reaching and grasping. Understanding how the brain balances exploratory and goal-directed movement could suggest new ways to evaluate and treat movement disorders. Learning how landmarks tune the brain's internal map could clarify how Alzheimer's disease, other dementias, stroke and schizophrenia disrupt memory and cognition.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jean-Paul Noel
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience·Early-career
Develop a rodent virtual-reality task in which animals use optic flow to path integrate to a hidden target, then must separate self-motion from target-motion.
Jean-Marc Fellous
University of California-San Diego, CA·Neuroscience
Characterize whether ventral hippocampal place cells, whose firing zones are too broad to distinguish locations in small arenas, carry useful position information in very large environments, by recording dorsal and ventral hippocampus simultaneously in rats.
Najib Majaj
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Compare neural computations and behavioral algorithms in macaques foraging head-free in a foraging room with those during head-fixed navigation in virtual reality, to test whether restrained lab conditions differ from naturalistic ones.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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